Contributing writer Jeff Sauer and I had an illuminating breakfast today with Avid. We spoke with CTO Mike Rockwell, VP of Avid broadcast and work groups David Schleifer, and Dana Ruzicka, VP of Avid post solutions. We were especially interested in two announcements that Avid made at its press conference on Sunday—the release of the software-only, full-featured Media Composer, and the announcement of Interplay, Avid’s new pervasive asset-management-and-more solution.

Media Composer on a laptop is a very intriguing proposition for Avid facilities. Schleifer noted that many editors take work home with them, and in the past they’ve had to use Avid Xpress, which is limited in features relative to Media Composer. Not anymore.

With media moving across a facility every which way and onto laptops that are going god-knows-where, Interplay keeps a close eye on version control. Rockwell explained that for still images, editors can do a side-by-side view to see the exact changes between two different versions. He also hinted that Avid is working on extending that capability toward video files, which would certainly be groundbreaking.

At $5,000, software-only Media Composer has quite a bit of breathing room between it and Xpress Pro, but things get a little more muddy when you factor in the software that Avid now owns from the Pinnacle Systems acquisition. The Liquid line shuffles into those price points a little closely, but Ruzicka explained to us that the Liquid line and Avid’s software actually are focussed on performing different tasks. The customer base for Liquid and for Media Composer are thus very different—for Liquid, it’s more corporate video—and multimedia-oriented; for Media Composer it’s almost exclusively geared toward broadcast and film.