Avid Technology Inc. announced Tuesday that it will soon ship a new version of its digital video (DV)-friendly video editing software Xpress DV. Along with that, the company is lowering its price to US$695.
The new price point actually represents a realignment of Avid’s Xpress video editing software product line. Avid said it’s hoping to hit a wider audience of DV users with this new version, which is priced about $300 less than the street price of its predecessor. When Xpress DV 3.5 was released last year, it carried a suggested retail price of $1,699.
Avid Xpress DV offers 100 real-time effects — moving titles, picture-in-picture capability, automatic color correction and more. It also sports the same Avid workflow and a high degree of customization capability, to allow users to tailer the interface and remap the keyboard to work how they want to. Other features include keyframeable color effects, JKL trim, rolling and crawling titles, real-time motion effects and more.
The new Avid Xpress DV, which will begin shipping on November 15, 2003, includes the Mac OS X and Windows XP versions in the same box, and also bundles Boris Graffiti LTD, a 2D title creation and animation package; Sorenson Squeeze 3 video compression and encoding software; and, for Windows users, Sonic DVDit! SE DVD burning software.
If you already own Avid Xpress DV 3.5, the company is also offering an upgrade path to its recently released Xpress Pro product for $295. The scalable solution is designed to work with digital or analog video and can support Avid’s Mojo product, a FireWire-based video capture and conversion device.