FreshDV posts the Avid DS conference call
By S Simmons. Filed in Avid editing, Blogs and links, Editing, from the net |
Often when companies have a product to announce or some news to release they have a conference call with members of the media. Avid had one of these calls last week to announce the newest version of the Avid DS product line, version 10. FreshDV has posted audio of the call so if you are a DS user or just interested in Avid’s DS product then you can listen.
New features include (from the Avid website):
- New platform – HP xw8600, Nvidia FX 3700, Dual-link I/O card & Avid VideoRaid SR storage
- New high-performance host GPU based real-time processing pipeline of primary & advanced color correction, DVE effects, transitions, color limiting, and application of 1D & 3D LUTs
- Color management system with 1D & 3D LUTs, including Thomson, Kodak, and Iridias LUT formats
- DPX conform from Avid Media Composer with Avid AFE
- Symphony style secondary color correction
- Support for 1080p50 & 1080p59.94 (including new DNxHD formats: DNxHD 90, 290 & 440)
- Support for Avid Interplay
- Stereoscopic containers
Another new feature is the price which includes “turnkey pricing of DS v10 + HP workstation + 8TB storage to below $60K.” That’s a great price point for a system that can do as much as the DS does. It seems that the Avid DS has often been perceived as the “red-headed step child” of Avid. A lot things I’ve heard about DS over the years has been comments about poor performance and a clunky interface to the question of why Avid even needs the product at all when they have the Avid Symphony. I’ve heard the suffix DS called Door Stop by more than one owner over the years. But with that being said there are a lot of rabid DS owner and users who swear by the system. These users maintain one of the better wikis in the post-production Internet world at the DS wiki. I took a DS class years ago as I was offered some DS work. I always felt the DS was like any other system in that it has its own interface and you must learn on its terms. And like any piece of software, the more you use it the better editor you become. It has always been amazingly full featured in that you can do so much without ever having to touch another application. I think that is what turns off many editors. The Avid DS is so all encompassing it can be overwhelming. Avid attempted to make the transition easier for Media Composer editors a number of versions ago by adding some Media Composer like buttons to the interface. This was either a good thing or a bad thing depending on who you talked to.
While it looks like the new version 10 continues to move the platform forward I think many of us were disappointed in that we though it would add native support for RED. While it might have been too soon with the RED SDK only being recently released I hope native RED support is coming to Avid DS. What a great solution that would be for a DS shop … offline on Media Composer, send a list over to DS and have it conform the edit right from the raw .R3D RED files. Yes the DS can work with DPXs but that is just an extra step and totally unnecessary if you can work with the native RED format. Maybe the programmers are working on that one.
Wednesday, August 27th 2008 at 2:48 pm
I think it’ll be a little while before we see native R3D support in DS. No NLEs have native support for the RAW files yet (SCRATCH isn’t really an NLE), Adobe Premiere is closest but their toolset has been being developed by RED themselves. The RED SDK is out, but is still fairly limited. It probably has enough functionality in it to allow the Avid engineers to get R3D data into DS, but I’d say they’d be a little cautious about releasing functionality based on the first release of the SDK.
Also the clear metadata flow through the Avid applications is still a little up in the air. Currently Metacheater is the most reliable option, but RED’s own tools now support ALE exports (with limited success in my experience) and Avid is working on a path to get the XML from REDCINE into Avid as well. I’m not really familiar with DS yet, so I can’t say what would be absolutely needed for a reliable conform but the Metacheater workflow can track timecode and ‘reel’ name (filename) which might be enough.
One big positive is that the new hardware certainly has the grunt to get good performance out of the R3D files.