Number Nine Follows SGI Pact With Avid Alliance

Electronic News, July 20, 1998

Avid, which owns critical digital TV capture and editing tools IP, will use Number Nine's 128-bit "Ticket to Ride" (TTR) graphics processor chips (EN, June 22) in its newly-introduced digital nonlinear finishing system, Avid Symphony. The Symphony system aims to replace tape-based television finishing processes and augments Avid's current suite of computer-based solutions for television post-production.

The graphics subsystems of the Symphony system will be powered by two TTR graphics chips, effectively processing dual 128-bit, real-time graphics streams from a single graphics board.

Symphony will be Avid's Intel processor focused system for television post-production, and will run under Microsoft's Windows NT 4.0.

Avid's Macintosh-based Media Composer system is widely used for video editing, and the Symphony system is meant to complement it. One reason Avid came to Number Nine is the same reason SGI did; the software drivers and other engineering for a dual-monitor interface in Windows NT. Macintosh users have been able to horizontally scroll and work in two full screen environments at once. According to Number Nine, another of Avid's design requirements was smooth scaling of real-time video in true-color (16.8 million displayable colors) display modes under Windows NT.

TTR "is one of the few chips on the market that is designed with a front-end color space converter for converting YUV video data into viewable RGB (red, blue green) data" to do that, the company said.