Avid Xpress Pro HD: First Impressions and HDV Editing

[MarkG]

Looks like Avid are finally starting to get serious about taking on Apple: they're supposed to be releasing a new version of Xpress Pro with HD support in the next few weeks:



Shame that HDV support is still six months away!

 

[MarkG]

Well, so far it seems to work OK: I've been transcoding raw HDV footage to Avid's DNxHD 145 Mbps codec, and I can edit that without dropping frames too often. So on my P4-3.06/1GB/SATA150 system it seems to be pretty similar in performance to the P3-350/256MB/ATA33 system I used to have when I was first editing DV .

 

[filmcreate]

HDV

HDV

You're Lucky...HDV is not supported on Avid Xpress Pro HD 5.0


Your drop frame may also be because of that lousy MPEG-2 compression HDV uses.

I believe the recent Avid 5.1.4 upgrade supports it now.

 

[MarkG]

No, the dropped frames is because the Avid HD codec uses 145Mbps, which is more than my hard drives can sustain forever. 5.1.4 doesn't have HDV support yet, it will be 5.2 or 5.5 (different people have seen different Beta versions with different version numbers ).