What is Avid Symphony?

Edit Geek by Dylan Reeve

Avid is currently (until June 15, 2012) running a special upgrade/crossgrade promo on Avid Symphony. You can crossgrade your Final Cut Pro (V7 or before) or upgrade your old Avid (Xpress Pro, Xpress DV or Media Composer) license to a brand new Symphony v6.0 license for a meagre US$995. That is a $5,000 discount on the full price, and $2,500 discount on the Avid Media Composer crossgrade price.

Only five or six years ago an Avid Symphony system would have cost nearly US$100,000. So, what is Symphony? Why was it so expensive? Why is it so much cheaper at the moment? What’s different? And, crucially, should you buy it?

Avid’s Media Composer product is kind of split in three. There is the main product, Media Composer – most people just call it Avid - this is the editing tool that we’re used to and what Avid promotes most heavily. It also has two cousins (actually more like fraternal twins), NewsCutter and Symphony.

These two products are developed from the same source code as Media Composer – when there’s a new version of Media Composer there is usually a new version of Symphony and NewsCutter too.

NewsCutter, as the name suggests, is mainly intended for use in a broadcast news environment, it has tight integration with Avid’s Interplay and iNews products to allow for more efficient editing within an Avid newsroom environment (you may not realise, but Avid makes a lot of products really targeted at TV news production). read more...

Check out these items featured in this post and available now at Videoguys.com.
	Avid Symphony 6 Crossgrade from Apple Final Cut Pro $995.00			Avid Symphony 6 Upgrade for Avid Editors $995.00			Avid Nitris DX HD I/O and Monitoring Hardware $5,499.00