Product Review: Avid|DS HD Version 6

Now consider that Avid is the captain and Avid|DS is the ship. The long sail is into the future where the winds of formats, applications, and standards remain unpredictable. Instead of sails, Avid has packed its ship's hold with every conceivable tool to weather nearly any variation in the media industry's barometer. Like Columbus, Avid is hitting the high seas with three vessels, allowing customers to choose their preferred configuration and price.

Avid|DS version 6 comes in three configurations which are upgradable. For those just entering the HD arena, the Avid|DS HD Editor offers conforming and finishing functions for the price of $85,000, with competitive upgrade plans now available that can drop the entry price as low as $65,000. HD Editor achieves its relatively low introductory price by serving principally as an editing and finishing system with all the capabilities of the higher-end version, minus some of the comprehensive effects and compositing features. As a finishing system it is designed to conform projects edited on an SD Media Composer offline system.

For those not equipped with an SD Media Composer, Avid|DS HD Editor can conform from virtually any offline system that provides EDL output (in addition to OMF and AAF conforming).

If your project does not require the compositing and advanced effects functions offered in other Avid|DS software, an entire project can be taken from start to finish on a Avid|DS HD Editor system.

Avid|DS SD, which strips out the HD capabilities of the Avid|DS HD and substitutes a full array of real-time effects, multiple hours of storage and a Media Composer style editorial interface hits the waves at $115,000. Although lacking HD capability, this model significantly advances the real-time capabilities of Avid systems, eliminating most of the wasted time heretofore required by rendering effects and composites.

The flagship of the line, Avid|DS HD ($161,000) comes with 40 minutes (upgradable to as much as 6 Terabytes, or about 14 hours) of uncompressed HD capacity and combines the Media Composer interface with a wide range of compositing tools. The system allows editors who are already familiar with the Media Composer interface to work within a familiar editorial environment, including project bins and views. In addition, more than 80 percent of the titles, effects, and graphics commonly created in an offline session can be automatically transferred to the Avid|DS HD (as well as the Avid|DS) for high-resolution finishing.

Matt Allard, product marketing manager for the DS line, noted that the maturation of HD had created a demand for editors who could straddle the boundary from SD, "We believe now is the time to equip trained Media Composer editors with the tools necessary to make the transition."

DS Features
Avid|DS 6.0 conforms to AAF (Advanced Authoring Format) specifications that allow bins, clips, and sequences from Media Composer, Symphony, and Avid Xpress to load into DS systems with many effects and keyframe settings intact. Non-Avid systems like [Apple's] Final Cut Pro may also export offline edits to an Avid|DS 6.0, but, since Final Cut Pro does not support AAF output, the Avid|DS system will only import Final Cut Pro's EDLs. Keyframe or layer information from Final Cut Pro systems are lost when transitioning to any AAF system.

Character Generator text from Media Composer offlines can be quickly loaded and vectorized into HD. This feature allows for many producers to create dual-purpose shows, shot in HD, and distributed in SD and HD with minimal added expense.

The video tracks in the DS systems are nearly identical to the Media Composer system, using a bottom-up hierarchy, track patching, track solos and mutes, sync lock and track resizing. The new system offers complete source/record, JKL trimming, drag-and-drop of color-coded effects to the timeline, locators, Matchframe, and scratch removal.

The principal advantage of the DS line's version 6 is its complete compatibility with Media Composer routines, making it a transparent and very necessary addition to the highest rung of Avid's vertical market. This development makes it possible for all levels of Avid editors to feed work up the chain to multiformat distributors. A project that is offline edited on an Avid laptop system can now easily migrate to an online, uncompressed HD release with the absolute minimum of reconfiguration labor.

Underlying Hardware
The system is hosted on an off-the shelf, non-proprietary Compaq (now known as, "the new HP") W8000 workstation equipped with two 2.2 GHz Pentium IV processors and 1.5 GB RAM. Our test system was equipped with 1.2 Terrabytes of Seagate LVD SCSI hard drives. Although the system worked faultlessly during our tenure, I noted that the video storage drives were a simple JBOD (just a bunch of drives) configuration without RAID failure protection. One would think that the importance of some of the projects anticipated to run on such a system would warrant some level of drive crash protection.

The system I reviewed offered four simultaneous, real-time SD streams of video, but this capability is only limited by the bandwidth of the workstation, its CPUs, and storage. As Windows workstations get faster the number of real-time streams will only increase. The technique of relying on the host workstation to support video capability is a reliable alternative to the technique of offering users dedicated peripheral cards, such as those offered by Leitch DPS and Matrox. Upgrading the capabilities of the system, therefore, may be executed by upgrading the host workstation.

The Avid|DS family includes a remote processor option, the Avid|DS RP ($6,000), which emulates the duties of a render farm to which an editor may delegate work while continuing to edit. Avid strongly recommends the inclusion of an Avid|DS RP in all of its configurations, but I would think that it would be absolutely necessary for the HD system, since no full resolution HD effects can be played in real-time (you can create effects and edit them interactively without rendering) on the Avid|DS HD without rendering. The Avid|DS RP minimized the wait for these renderings during my test, although sitting and watching them click across the screen evokes our days as editors in the dawn of nonlinear SD technology. But then, so much of HD production is technically nostalgic. With proper workflow management, online, full resolution HD rendering on the Avid|DS RP can be kept fairly well in the background of a normal session, perhaps even to the level of being invisible to a supervising client.

The typical Avid|DS deskstation includes two large, flat screenmonitors. Improvements in Avid's underlying machine code in Version 6 have resulted in an approximately 30 percent increase in processing speed, independent of hardware.

Workflow
The trick of skippering Avid's DS ship is the ability to hop aboard and get somewhere with minimal learning curve. Most of us have already paid our dues (both in time and money) learning the Avid interface and don't want to spend more time learning the upgrades. DS users will be happy to learn that the hold (bins), helm (operating controls), and sails (interfaces) haven't changed much at all from the familiar Avid vessels we've come to love.

Bin organization is highly text supported, allowing for searches on any parameter of field category. Clips may be lassoed and dragged to the timeline. The look and feel of bins closely resembles that of Microsoft Explorer with similar shortcuts for cutting and pasting batches of clips and organizing reels of media. Having worked in lower cost systems where the movement of one clip from Project A to Project B can wreak havoc, this feature adds subtle value to Avid's design.

The keyboard and all interface functions are easily customized. Most editors eventually fall into a keyboard-cursor pattern that can remain unchanged for an entire career, tempting software designers to avoid offering the flexibility that Avid considers standard. However, new types of programming demand new routines. A reality show might be cut twice as fast if its editor, switching from a compositing background, could reconfigure the interfaces to substitute fast B-roll manipulation for fast version iteration. Surviving this market, like sailing in changing winds, means being able to quickly reconfigure your machine.

Complex effects, once created, appear as color-coded ribbons above a clip. The effect itself, where practical, is independent of the clip and may be moved, duplicated, and pasted. This is a highly useful function when an effect itself becomes part of the identity of a show (see Blind Date's "thought bubbles" for an example). Once a useful effect has been assembled, the effect can be named, stored in a logical location, and recalled forever more. I love this feature. In lesser priced systems, unique effects tend to get buried with a dumped project and simply lost.

Editors can view their projects in any one of four visual paradigms; Timeline, Tree, Track, and Layer. Timeline is most familiar to traditional editors. Tree view emulates a compositing system like discreet's flame. Track view will be most familiar to Adobe After Effects users (ah, those twirlies will never die). Layer view is most like Adobe Photoshop. I imagine most editors will pick one view and live with it, but at times, like when you are in the middle of an unusually large composite effect, the ability to look at things in an entirely different light is quite useful. Incidentally, Avid|DS SD and HD have the ability of combining four independent, uncompressed SD streams in real time.

Rapid Acceptance

The advantages of Avid|DS 6 are quickly being accepted by industry and educational leaders. The USC Film School has acquired systems for its bullpen, the Discovery Channel is using an HD system for broadcast, and Avid's marketing staff recently oversaw a test of the DS system during the production of recent episodes of Crossing Jordan and The Guardian.

I think DS is the future -- or a good part of it, anyhow.