Little Frog in High Def by Shane Ross

Today Avid Technology issued a press release outlining the changes and new features in their latest version of the Media Composer software, Avid Media Composer 5.5.  Among the new features is one that particularly excites me…and it has been very difficult to keep quiet about this (I’m on the Avid Beta, so I’ve been playing with this for a while).  Media Composer 5.5 now works with AJA hardware, specifically, the AJA IO Express.  What is major about this announcement, other than adding another third party partner to their list (they opened up MC5 to the Matrox MXO2 Mini last year) is that this isn’t just another monitoring solution…this is a capture solution as well.

Yes, you can capture and output using the AJA IO Express.  Capture to Avid MXF media.  Have deck control so that you can capture and output with accurate timecode. That’s a big deal!  Sure, it doesn’t offer the hardware acceleration that the DX line of hardware does, but it is a great economical way to get your footage into and out of your system.

Not long ago…last year, around NAB in April…Avid announced Media Composer 5, and I blogged about it.  One of the things that I mentioned that was HUGE was monitoring via non-Avid hardware, specifically the Matrox MXO2 mini.  That was a huge thing…now we could monitor what we were doing without the expensive Avid hardware.  Because that was a gripe of a lot of people, that yes, the Media Composer software is now inexpensive, but still they needed to shell out upwards of $8000 for a Mojo DX  just to see what they were doing on a monitor.  They didn’t need to capture, they just needed to monitor…as they shoot tapeless. read more...