Avid unveils new family of digital video editing systems

Las Vegas – Avid Technology, Inc. unveiled a new family of professional digital video editing systems including new generation versions of Avid Media Composer v3.0, NewsCutter v7.0, and Symphony v3.0 software; as well as new hardware configurations for Mojo DX and Nitris DX.

The new releases improves real-time performance by using available computing bandwidth to disperse the processing of video and effects across the system for more responsive HD editing, and to provide greater creative freedom and flexibility. A new architectural design integrates Avid software and hardware with the CPU, host graphics card and PCI Express connection to reduce lag time in editorial work on HD material.

Avid’s new editing lineup offers real-time output of major SD and HD formats; a real-time effects architecture that ties multi-core CPU, GPU and PCI Express hardware into a single pipeline; improved codec and file-based format support including native support for ‘thin raster’ formats including DVCPRO HD and XDCAM HD, with real-time output with multiple streams of HD; native editing support for AVC-I, supported in 50Mb/s and 100Mb/s formats, via the same Avid workflow as P2/DVCPRO HD; Sony XDCAM-EX and JVC 23.976p and 25p HDV codecs.

Also available included is support for OS X Leopard and Windows Vista 32 and 64 bit operating systems; a SubCap visible captioning tool for subtitles with import and export of EBU-N19 formats; MetaFuze, a new tool to merge single-frame files from film scanning or CGI systems into a single media clip on the Windows platform; a real-time multi-window timecode burn-in tool which burns multiple timecodes and sequence information onto a video and superimposes the timecode over the picture during output and playback; Blu-ray output with new Avid DVD by Sonic; and XML export for sequences via Avid FilmScribe to export source and record side metadata as XML including change notes.

Available configurations include Media Composer software for independent or mobile film and video editors seeking a portable offline editing solution with support for file-based editing; Media Composer Mojo DX for small studios and production companies doing on-location work offering standard digital SD and HD I/O; Media Composer Nitris DX for post facilities requiring a full feature edit bay and offers analogue and digital I/O with Avid DNxHD encode and decode; Symphony Nitris DX on Mac and Windows systems suited for online finishing facilities using the Media Composer along with secondary and relational color correction and universal mastering.

Other configurations are NewsCutter software for news editing in the field, tapeless and networked news environments; NewsCutter Mojo DX for full-featured suite-based news editing with real-time multi-format playback and effects, together with standard digital SD and HD I/O; as well as NewsCutter Nitris DX which includes NewsCutter capabilities with analogue and digital I/O with Avid DNxHD encode and decode.

Avid’s new HD systems are expected to be available in Q2 2008.