Ever since introducing Media Composer back in 1989, Avid has claimed a large section of the video editing market by making its editing software a standard for others to live up to. This was due not only to Avid's early foray into the world of nonlinear editing, but as a direct result of its strong media management support and useful editing tools. However, with so many editing programs on the market today, Avid has more pressure than ever to make every software update count. With the release of version 5.5 of its popular Media Encoder editing software, Avid is clearly looking to do just that.

What's New

The answer is quite a bit... for a point five update that is. In keeping with its recent policy of third party hardware support, Avid has added the ability to capture, monitor, and output with AJA Io Express in Media Composer. It has also added the HDCAM SR Lite codec to its popular Avid Media Access tool, more support for control surfaces from their recent acquisition of the Euphonix company, along with better search capabilities with the exciting new PhraseFind tool, better integration with their extremely successful Pro Tools audio software, and the ability to tweak transitions with the Smart Tool feature. With these new tools and updates, Avid is showing that it has no intention of giving up its highly respected spot in the editing world.

Hardware Support

When Avid announced support for the Matrox MXO2 Mini at NAB 2010, it literally sent shockwaves through the editing world. Up until that point, the only way to increase the quality of video capture and to monitor high quality footage in real-time was with their specialized Nitris DX and Mojo DX hardware which could cost a pretty penny. With the support of the MXO2 Mini, Avid was signaling its intention to give its editors more cost effective options for capturing and monitoring video, putting Avid editing back into the hands of the smaller shops.

In this release, Avid has not only upgraded what the MXO2 Mini can do (it now supports SD 23.976, 720p 23.98, 1080p 23.98, 1080p 24, 1080p 25, and 1080p 29.97), it has extended their support to other popular devices like AJA's Io Express. The Io Express has the ability to capture SD and HD footage over SDI under Media Composer control making the Io Express a great middle-of-the-road hardware solution that is more powerful than the Matrox MXO2, without a huge price tag to match. This now means that Avid editors have the choice between two major monitoring hardware manufacturers along with Avid's own devices making the Media Composer more flexible and affordable than ever.

On the Avid side, there is also a new hardware module for the Nitris DX chassis that can accelerate the render intensive AVC-Intra codec. This enables built-in AVC-Intra encoding and decoding in real-time and in multistream timelines. For those using Panasonic's tapeless camcorders, this will be a useful hardware update to get.

Avid Media Access Update

Another great feature of Avid Media Composer is Avid Media Access. For those who aren't familiar with it, the AMA is Avid's solution for supporting certain media types without having to transcode them first. In the past, no matter what codec you filmed with, it would have to be transcoded into Avid's high-quality DNxHD codec for smooth playback in the Media Composer software. This not only required time for the re-encoding to take place, but essentially doubled the hard drive space it took to store the footage.

For editors working on documentaries and other large-scale projects, this posed a real problem. As a result, in the previous update of Media Composer, Avid included the ability to edit QuickTime, Apple ProRes, H.264 video files, and Canon XF and XDCAM codecs natively. Now in its newest iteration, Avid has also included support for Sony's HDCAM-SR Lite and SR SQ codecs, which are a new file format for Sony's tapeless camcorders. If that weren't enough, you can even download new codecs from Avid or camcorder manufacturer's websites as they become available. This is an incredibly helpful feature that will help Media Composer compete directly against many of the other big editing software companies which all have similar support for multiple formats.