Article Focus: Creative Cow's Bob Donlon reports with up-to-the-minute news for Avid users who have wondered where the company was going in the world of HD and 10-bit support. In this report, Bob offers Cow members all the news penned within hours of attending Avid's New York City December 8, 2004 press event. While attending, Bob not only watched as Avid not only rolled out their HD plans and their 10-bit support for Media Composer Adrenaline users but Avid had another big surprise up their sleeves -- the just-announced SpectraMatte™ chroma keyer. Read on for all the latest from the Avid mothership in Tewksbury...
New York, New York — December 8, 2004
On this balmy evening in a trendy disco in the heart of midtown Manhattan, Avid Technology demonstrated several now-shipping upgrades that many of us have been long awaiting, and others that were an impressive surprise to the audience of notoriously skeptical New York City creatives. Technical Product Manager / Adrenaline Product Designer Doug Hansel treated us to an in-depth demonstration of Avid’s new DNxcel hardware – an add-on option for the Adrenaline DNA – as well as a host of other new goodies including a brand new proprietary chroma-keyer dubbed Spectramatte™.
Doug Hansel, Avid Technology’s Technical Product Manager and Adrenaline Product Designer, demonstrates Avid’s new Spectramatte™ technology, unveiled for the first time at the Avid Town Bash in New York City on December 8, 2004. -- photo copyright 2004 by Bob Donlon
For those Media Composer Adrenaline owners who have been clamoring for 10-bit SD support, Avid announced a software upgrade to ship this month for free to Avid Assurance customers (and at an unavailable price as of press time to other customers – hey there was an open bar, ok?). This will not only give existing MC/Adrenaline users 10 bit SD capabilities via a software-only upgrade (including 16 bit and full-raster processing on renders), but will also give them the new Spectramatte™ chroma-keyer as well as Avid’s DNxHD encoding technology (“HD at uncompressed SD data rates”) and native support for DVCPRO HD, HDCAM, and other HD camcorder formats.
One of the coolest things I saw in the demo was Doug playing back pristine-quality 1080i HD footage in Avid’s DNxHD format from an Ikegami disk pack via a USB2 connection on a laptop on Avid’s Xpress Pro software. Not a bad demo to back up the claim that you can do mastering-quality HD with an SD infrastructure, even with the very affordable $1,696 MSRP Avid Xpress Pro HD.
Yeah, how about that -- Media Composer/Adrenaline owners aren’t the only ones that were invited to this party. Avid also announced Xpress Pro HD, the first portable HD version of the company’s industry-leading nonlinear digital editing software. Scheduled to ship worldwide later this month, Avid Xpress Pro HD software delivers support for native Panasonic DVCPRO HD acquisition and editing, Avid DNxHD™ editing and rendering, and real-time SD multicam functionality (yup, you can play back the multiple angles in realtime now).
Both Media Composer and Xpress Pro customers will receive native HDV support as part of a free software update scheduled for mid-2005.
Other things of note in the currently shipping upgrades are the capability to play all available SD and HD resolutions in the same timeline (in both Media Composer and Xpress Pro), native support for DV50 and DV100 (also for both the expensive and cheap seats), and for Media Composer owners, realtime Multicam editing in HD (9 simultaneous realtime angles of SD were demonstrated tonight).
