Though our industry is supposedly in recession, Avid exploded with several new technology announcements at NAB2003.
The new Avid DNA (Digital Nonlinear Accelerators) is a new generation of hardware designed to speed up all aspects of video content creation.
"We have completely reinvented Avid," said David Krall, president and CEO of Avid Technology Inc. "We spliced together host-based software and hardware-based acceleration to create a revolutionary hybrid architecture that leverages our complete family of digital nonlinear accelerators called Avid DNA."
The biggest product announcement in the history of Avid is the result of a $50 million investment in R&D over the past three years. As explained at an NAB press conference, Avid DNA is actually a triple helix comprised of Avid "Mojo" for its new portable Avid Xpress Pro systems, "Adrenaline," a facility-class accelerator for the Avid Media Composer line, and "Nitris," a top-end speed booster for the Avid DS family of NLEs that provides the equivalent computing power of 30 Pentium 4 processors.
In addition, DNA technology can be paired with its NewsCutter broadcast NLEs to create NewsCutter Adrenaline FX and NewsCutter XP with Avid Mojo which will also allow its newsroom editing systems to support a broad range of video formats from DV to IMX to uncompressed SD over a standard FireWire connection. NewsCutter Adrenaline FX can even be expanded for future HD productions.
Another Avid technology, MetaSync, can now also now automate the creation of closed captioning and subtitling in conjunction with software provided by Final Draft and Recap authoring systems.
The cornucopia of announcements also included Avid MEDIArray ZX, a 2.88 terabyte disk storage subsystem representing the newest building block in the Avid Unity MediaNetwork family of shared storage systems, and a preview of Digidesign Pro Tools v. 6.1 that adds Windows XP compatibility to the digital audio workstation platform. Finally, Softimage, the 3-D division of Avid, debuted version 3.5 software for its Softimage|XSI animation system. The latest version adds interoperability with the Nitris accelerator.
Copyright 2003 NAB
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