Videoguys NAB Report - Avid Technology
The buzz around the Avid booth wasn't about new products, but rather a new corporate logo and identity. The new Avid logo uses shapes familiar to video editors to make the word AVID. I must admit that at first glance I liked the logo, but it took me a couple of double takes before I realized the shapes spelled out the word Avid. When you see the logo created using images of people using Avid products it becomes even more powerful. Over the past several years Avid has been acquiring companies like DigiDesign and M-Audio for audio, Pinnacle for consumer video and Sybelius for learning music. They admittedly haven’t done the best job of tying them all together and leveraging the power and reputation of the brands – which brings us to focus of Avid’s new identity.
DigiDesign ProTools is the standard in the music and film scoring industry. Grammy, Oscar and Emmy winning music and soundtracks are created with ProTools every day. A few years ago Avid put out a bundle called Xpress Studio Complete that included Xpress Pro and ProTools, the only problem was and still is, that you can't use them together. Avid is making progress. Today you can install Media Composer 3.5 and ProTools 9 on the same computer, unfortunately you can't run them both at the same time. You can use the new Satellite software to allow a Media Composer workstation to communicate in real-time with a ProTools workstation for collaboration. Hopefully by next years NAB we'll not only be able to run ProTools and Media Composer at the same time, Avid will have added a layer of integration and workflow that takes it to the next level.
While Avid didn't have any new product announcements at NAB, they had just released Media Composer 3.5 just a couple of months ago. MC 3.5 introduces several new features and performance gains. With the release of Avid Media Composer 3.5 Avid has once again delivered the most stable, efficient and powerful video editing solution in the world. Regardless of your platform (PC or Mac), Media Composer taps into all of your computers power, taking advantage of multiple CPU cores, the latest GPU technology to deliver unprecedented performance, and expansive memory when running Vista 64 bit OS.
No other NLE supports as wide of a range of HD formats and settings as Media Composer including Canon 24f HDV, Sony progressive HDV and tapeless workflows like P2, XD Cam and Red.
Avid Media Access (AMA) allows you to edit directly from XDCAM or P2 footage – with no need for transcoding, re-wrapping or other workarounds. AMA adds full native metadata support as well for XDCAM HD/EX and P2.
At NAB Avid did launch the Avid Stimulus Program. This promotion offers special deals on specific Avid products. For a limited time you can purchase Media Composer 3.5 for under $2,000. That's the full Media Composer Suite that includes not just media Composer, but over $1,000 worth of top notch NLE plug-ins!
Avid NAB Stimulus Program: Upgrade to MojoDX for under $5K!
Existing Avid Mojo and Mojo SDI owners can upgrade to Avid Mojo DX (with the Media Composer 3.5 Upgrade included) for only $4,995 - that's a 33% discount with no pesky trade-ins required. Just provide your Mojo or Mojo SDI serial number when you place your order. Offer expires June 17, 2009.
The MojoDX Hardware provides HD-SDI & SD-SDI input of uncompressed video into Media Composer. In addition to SDI (both HD & SD) output you also get HDMI HD output with 5.1 surround sound straight from the timeline.
The new Avid Mojo DX architecture tightly connects the host workstation and PCI Express I/O hardware into a single high-bandwidth, high-performance effects engine. The architecture is optimized for highly responsive real-time editing using the latest generation of HD codecs, including HDV, XDCAM-HD, DVCPRO HD, AVC-I, and Avid DNxHD. What does that means to you? Simple - Connect MojoDX to Media Composer 3.5 and get more HD editing performance. More layers in real-time, more responsive timeline and a tapeless HD workflow that is second to none!
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