Avid Technology’s theme for the upcoming NAB2001 will be "Make, Manage and Move Media." In fact, the new slogan, officially introduced by the Tewksbury, Mass.-headquartered firm at this year’s confab, will be the company’s official positioning statement from this point on, replacing "Tools for Storytellers."
The change signifies a shift in Avid’s corporate branding, according to company president/ CEO David Krall. "While we remain steadfastly committed to making the best content creation tools, we realize that the effective transition to the world of digital media requires that we also deliver solutions for storing, managing and distributing that media," said Krall, in a pre-NAB press briefing. "Toward that end, we have developed or acquired key digital technologies to allow us to deliver complete end-to-end solutions for our customers. We see a digital media revolution taking place, and are excited to be delivering the products we believe will help lead the charge."
At NAB, Avid will be showcasing just-launched products and upgrades to existing products at the Sands Expo Center. New products are Review & Approval; ProEncode, for the automated creation of compressed media for the Web; MediaStation, for background input and output of material so users don’t have to tie up their creative editing suites with technical tasks; and the DS Remote Processing Station, which allows editors and digital artists to continue experimenting while computationally intensive tasks are processed in the background. For the first time Avid will be highlighting the Trilligent Cluster, a turnkey streaming media system.
SHOOT met with Janette Bradley, director and executive producer, AvidProNet—the online content, community and services portal for media creation professionals—for a demonstration of Review & Approval. The system has been dubbed the first Internet browser-based application for frame-accurate review and approval of video content that can be integrated directly into an Avid workflow.
This new service promises to transform the traditional, often tedious, review and approval process—reviewing, distributing and tracking multiple versions of videotape—into a convenient, efficient and straightforward online process. "This new Web-based service offers benefits to all parties involved in creating, reviewing and finalizing video content, making the approval process much faster and easier all the way around," claimed Bradley. "Media creators can produce more work, ultimately making them more profitable, and their customers can document their comments in a highly precise fashion, whenever and wherever they are," she added.
To use Review & Approval, media creators upload a video project onto the Web and assign individuals to review the content. Each designated reviewer receives an e-mail, complete with password for security purposes, inviting him or her to review and comment on the piece. Reviewers can make frame-accurate comments while connected to the Internet or while working offline. Originators can monitor the status of reviews from the AvidProNet Web site and can either view comments in a browser or save them as a Review & Approval file that can be incorporated directly into the Timeline of a supported Avid editing system. According to Bradley, encryption of media files offers security typically not available with e-mail or FTP-based solutions.
For the week beginning Feb. 26, Review & Approval was offered free of charge for production companies to beta-test. Now pricing starts at $38 per review and varies according to file size, level of encryption security and number of reviewers. The software is free to download from the AvidProNet Web site. Extensions to the service will be demonstrated at NAB.
Commenting on the technology, Larry Bridges, president/ founder of Red Car—which has editorial houses in New York, Chicago, Santa Monica, San Francisco, Dallas and Toronto—said he had worked on the beta model and liked the upgrade. He hopes it will be available on the Apple Macintosh in the near future. "I think it’s a good model and fits into what Avid is doing. We are doing something similar on Red Car’s own Web site, where we make cuts on the Avid, encode them to QuickTime, send passwords out and encrypt them if we need to," he reported. "But this is very labor intensive, and I think what Avid is offering is a good tool for people who don’t have a lot of people running around behind them and just want an easy way to publish and get what would otherwise go as a cassette. I also like how Avid is integrating it on their platform," Bridges commented.
Late last month, Avid announced the global shipping of Avid/ DS HD, which is the first nonlinear production system for conforming and finishing projects at multiple uncompressed HD and standard definition formats. Like its predecessor, Avid/DS, the product will provide a complete range of integrated picture and audio editing, compositing, paint, animation, character generation and project management tools. Pricing starts at $300,000.
Uses for Avid/DS HD are expected to be mastering television commercials, station promos, high-end corporate and event videos, TV programs and theatrical releases in uncompressed HD formats. Avid/DS HD supports 720p, 1080i, 1080p as well as PAL and NTSC formats at 24, 25, 29.97 and 30 frames per second. All resolutions and formats can exist on the system simultaneously, allowing operators to switch from 601 to high-def without reformatting drives or removing existing material
Avid/DS HD turnkey systems also ship with Avid/DS Remote Processing capability and can be used in conjunction with Symphony, Media Composer, Avid Xpress, SoftImage, ProTools and Avid Unity products as part of a networked postproduction environment. According to a press statement released on April 4, Avid had more 30 orders in the first week.
APPLE’S FINAL CUT
PRO 2
There has been a lot of buzz surrounding the release of Apple’s Final Cut Pro 2, the next generation of the company’s video editing, compositing and special effects software. In short, Final Cut Pro 2’s biggest advantage over its predecessor is the inclusion of real-time editing architecture. It also supports virtually all professional video formats and has scores of feature enhancements, plus a suite of animation, graphics, audio and compression software applications.
The Cupertino, Calif.-headquartered Apple started shipping the software—which is targeted at professional editors working on feature/short films, broadcast and commercials—on March 19. Retail price is $999 with upgrades for existing users of Final Cut Pro at $249. The software requires Mac OS9.1, a Macintosh computer with a 300-Mhz or faster PowerPC G3 or G4 processor, QuickTime 5, 192 MB of RAM (256 MB for real-time processing) and 20MB of available disk space for installation.
Final Cut Pro 2 takes advantage of Apple’s new Power Mac G4 and PowerBook G4 lines, and the new QuickTime 5 architecture to deliver gains in video editing productivity.
In development for a year, the software was built so that real-time editing and compositing functions could be seamlessly integrated into the video production workflow. By adding an optional supported real-time processing card, video editors can instantly perform wipes, dissolves, and 2-D motion graphic effects. This allows third-party manufacturers to create hardware that supports a variety of professional editing features and formats. The first card to support Final Cut Pro is the RTMac card from Matrox, which provides real-time broadcast-quality transitions and effects, and uncompressed 32-bit, animated graphics in a dual-stream, native-DV editing environment. Matrox is headquartered in Dorval, Quebec.
Tom McDonald, Apple product line manager, video applications, told SHOOT that further announcements regarding the availability of additional cards on the system should be expected at NAB.
"At NAB we will see an incredible amount of professional software that was typically found on NT or SGI machines, now on the Mac platform," predicted McDonald. "The performance we are now getting out of the G4 and the Power Mac line has reached the point where the machines can do an incredible amount of video processing and content creation when compared to other systems. As a result, we are finding all our third party developers are migrating to the Macintosh platforms."
According to Apple, on compute-intensive operations, Final Cut Pro 2 is up to 30 percent faster on G4 systems and 70 percent faster on dual-processor G4 systems, when compared to the previous generation’s performance on similarly configured systems.
In terms of where the software sits in the market, McDonald said that although Apple is likely to attract users of Adobe Premier, which is also marketed as an affordable nonlinear editing program, and Avid, he was loath to label those companies as competitors. "Final Cut Pro is not competing with Adobe Premier. People will often make the mistake between Adobe Premier and Final Cut Pro because they both come in a box. There is a tremendous amount of difference. If you look at the tool set of Final Cut Pro, it is more Avid-like than any other application out there," he conceded.
And Avid? "I don’t look at us as replacing Avid systems. I look at us as augmenting what professional editors need. Avid editors are blown away that they can get all this functionality for $999. And if they put it on a G4, they get a turnkey editing system for $3,500, that can go toe to toe with the best editing systems out there. We are making that toolset more available; we are lowering the barrier of entry to truly professional editing systems," McDonald concluded.
