Avid Media Composer adrenaline - Reviews - Product/Service Evaluation

Post, Sept, 2003 by Tor Rolf Seemann

My interest in Avid peaked after seeing what they debuted at NAB this past April and then getting a hands-on look. Undoubtedly, this was a groundbreaking year for the NLE maker, at least from the end user's perspective--no doubt their R&D folks have been in development on this little nugget for several years.

Emerging from the dust is a new architecture that combines both the enhanced toolset of the Media Composer software with a revolutionary hardware line called Digital Nonlinear Accelerators, or DNA. In between the entry level Mojo hardware (insert Austin Powers joke here) announced at NAB, and the flagship Nitris hardware, is Adrenaline. And, its nomenclature makes complete sense when you think of its processing power. It is capable of processing uncompressed standard definition video over a single FireWire cable and is designed to provide the media processing power of 10 3GHz Pentium processors.

MC Adrenaline, not to be confused with that rave DJ that I met at Burning Man last summer, is the foundation for the next-generation Media Composer and Avid NewsCutter FX systems. With support for DV25, IMX, DV50, Meridien JFIF, AVR and uncompressed 601 resolutions, compatibility with other Avid systems, and the ability to expand to 10-bit video and 24-bit audio capabilities, this shiny silver box with fancy LEDs allows post pros to transform their Macs and PCs--into super-energized Avid editing workstations.

There seems to be a consistent theme with Avid's new direction this year. There's no one word that I can use to describe this theme, but it combines elements of increased open architecture, modesty and solid future proofing--with lots of headroom. It almost parallels real estate when you think of a home as an investment and its potential value over time. Avid is selling a moderate three-bedroom house on booming property. Right now, with dual Xeon 3.3 GHz processors on the HP xw8000 workstation it ships with, you can get a maximum of eight streams. Of course when you are depending a lot on the host workstation, this is not guaranteed to be sustained--things like drive-bandwidth, orbit of the moon and processors must be factored in. Five uncompressed streams of dual-field video are considered the norm on the current shipping HP host and about the same number of streams in Draft Mode on the Macintosh platform due to lower clock speeds and memory/disk bandwidth.

To me, this new family of products is a bold attempt by Avid to leave a status quo comfort zone and really push the envelope. These hybrid systems use every ounce of power the host processor has to offer, and they enhance that power with dedicated hardware acceleration. Using a software-only system, video processing power is dictated by CPU speed. By accelerating media I/O operations, the Avid DNA architecture augments what the host computer is capable of doing on its own while automatically scaling with the host processor in the future.

Adrenaline includes 24p Film Composer offline editing functionality, software-based multi-camera switching and a powerful realtime color correction tool that can automatically correct an entire sequence with a single click. Realtime multicam is currently available only in Meridien systems, In Adrenaline, up to four cameras can be ganged in a four-window grid. When parked, you see up to four still images. When you press play, the active window will play video while the other windows display a still image,

You can edit on-the-fly using the still images as reference. When you stop, all four windows update. The multi-camera functionality is a bit limited now, based mostly on software, but I'm told it will be flushed out in future upgrades.

Because Avid has realized over the years, that frequent hardware end-of-life announcements eventually tick people off, Adrenaline promises to be compatible with older Meridien and even ABVB media, which allows many users a pleasant upgrade path from their current systems. I found the new interface to be extremely fast and a natural progression from its ancestors. And it's the most open-architecture Avid I've ever seen; it's extremely flexible in terms of file formats and codecs. You can even use it on location with a laptop. It can read every format and spit out every format you'd ever desire. And when you or your clients are ready for HD, Adrenaline is ready to deliver--there's an empty HD bay in the hardware that will stare you down every day until you take the plunge.

SOME NOTEWORTHY SPECS:

* New realtime Open GL 2D and 3D DVE

* 10-bit SMPTE 259M SDI serial digital I/O

* Component YPbPr, S-Video and composite I/O

* DV I/O with realtime analog-to-DV and DV-to-analog conversion

* Uncompressed PAL and NTSC ITU-R601 formats

* Sync reference input

* Serial deck control and FireWire control

* Eight channels of ADAT audio I/O or stereo Toslink optical S/PDIF

* Four channels AES/EBU digital audio I/O