Avid Technology Inc. announced Monday its Xpress Pro 5.5 software. The company also introduced its Mojo SDI, a new device in its Digital Nonlinear Accelerator (DNA) product line. Xpress Pro 5.5 for Mac and Windows now supports High Definition (HD) video, and the Mojo SDI device provides analog and digital Serial Digital Interface (SDI) I/O connectors. Both products are anticipated for a June, 2006 release.
Xpress Pro 5.5 is Avid’s low-end pro digital video editing software — it costs $1,695 — for the Macintosh. It includes video, film and audio editing, encoding tools and custom music creation software. It supports native HDV and DVCPRO HD formats for acquisition, editing and output, real-time effects and 2:3 pulldown insertion over FireWire.
New to this release is HD and improved format support on Mac OS X. The software also now supports 10-bit uncompressed Standard Definition (SD) and native DV50 formats. Xpress Pro 5.5 has added real-time multicam support for Mac OS X, tapeless workflow, direct ingest of Sony XDCAM HD content over FireWire, new film and pulldown support, AVX 2 plug-in support and more.
What’s more, Avid said it will have a Universal Binary release available in a future version for Intel-based Macs.
Avid’s Mojo SDI is a $2,495 portable analog and digital SDI I/O device. It has the same analog connectivity as Avid Mojo, but adds SDI I/O and AES/EBU digital audio I/O.
The Mojo SDI works with uncompressed SD digital video, and also provides component, S-video and composite I/O, and FireWire. It can deliver up to eight channels of embedded audio over SDI, four channels over AES/EBU, four channels over line RCA and two channels over optical S/PDIF. What’s more, the Mojo SDI can also provide simultaneous output of video and effects to client monitor and tape.