A team of Videomaker editors recently ventured to Las Vegas, where they attended COMDEX– one of the world’s largest computer trade shows. The week-long event focuses heavily on new products and technologies by computer manufacturers for traditional computer applications. But as video continues to encompass more computer-based nonlinear systems, more computer manufacturers are releasing exciting new video-related products. Laden with press releases and product brochures, our intrepid team came back with the following announcements.
Dell Computer announced plans to produce the Dell NT Precision turnkey nonlinear editing workstation using a yet-to-be-named video digitizer card and nonlinear editing software.
Pinnacle showed off its DV500 DVD authoring board with Minerva software that will ship soon.
Panasonic unveiled the PV-DS1000 stand-alone turnkey nonlinear editor. This video editing appliance that will retail for about $2000 will compete head-to-head with Draco’s Casablanca and AVIO and Applied Magic’s Screenplay. This nonlinear editing solution is designed to work with FireWire-equipped camcorders. Panasonic said it will begin shipping sometime in January 2000.
AVerMedia displayed two new products: the MV-300, an MJPEG-based video digitizer card with an MSRP of $190 and the Video-Shuttle machine controller that only works with Ulead’s Media Studio Pro software.
Adaptec rolled out its Easy CD Creator 4 Deluxe that creates Video CDs and slide shows onto CD-Rom discs.
Ulead is set to ship VideoStudio 4, this latest version of the MPEG-2 video editing software for beginners, features support for FireWire and MP3 audio.
In other brief news, Pinnacle, Fast, Avid, Metabyte and Ulead will all release products using C-Cube’s MPEG-2 codec chips.This will allow video editing in the high-quality, high-compression MPEG-2 format. The chips can also be used in DVRs (digital video recorders). Sony announced that from now on, all VAIOs will come with I.Link (FireWire).
