Avid now lets you drag and drop clips onto the timeline. Take a moment and think about that. More than 20 years after Avid pioneered the digital video editing revolution, they caved to convention and added perhaps the most basic of ease of use features.

Let’s take a step back. I just saw a demo of the 3.0 versions of Symphony and Nitris and felt more positive about the company than I ever had before. For the first time, Avid seemed more concerned about bread and butter features that every day editors will love than high level features that look great in demos but benefit few editors.

To be sure, many of the features are simply catch-up in nature, like drag and drop. For example, Avid showed their version of a timeline that played multiple formats, which Pinnacle Edition could do in 2005, Premiere Pro could do in 2006 and Final Cut Pro could do in 2007. Who cares if it’s revolutionary, Avid editors will love it.

That said, there were several features that are superior to anything that I’ve seen in any other editor, like a new closed captioning tool that’s efficient and superbly integrated. There’s also a new timecode display effect that lets you display multiple displays over the image, like project timecode, reel timecode an the name of the digital file. You can also interrogate a timeline to identify the reel, file names, effects and other information regarding all clips on the timeline, then save this off as a separate file.

None of this stuff looks all that impressive on a spec sheet, but when you see it in a demo, you get the feeling that Avid’s new focus on the customer is a lot more than window dressing. Throw in some new hardware that fellow blogger Dan Ochiva will discuss in a different post, and you have a product offering that seems miles ahead of where I thought it was yesterday.