I just sat down with Boris Yamnitsky, the president and founder of his namesake Boris FX. A couple years ago Boris FX purchased the Media 100 line, keeping alive one of the most venerable nonlinear editing systems. It had been an extremely rocky time for Media 100; a company without such a devout and long-lasting user base probably would have folded up shop and discontinued its products.

Not Media 100. Under Yamnitsky’s leadership, Media 100 has advanced to 12.5 software, which was just announced at the show. The software is playing catch-up; one major new feature is HDV ingest via FireWire. The clips can’t be edited natively, but must be converted to another format, such as Media 100 HD or Apple’s ProRes. These fit the workflow of most Media 100 users, says Yamnitsky, and the higher-bit-rate formats hold up much better under the stress of digital effects.

Yamnitsky says that a lot of his new users are actually old users who are rediscovering the software. The draw, according to Boris, is that the software is designed to be performance oriented — there’s no scaling-down of footage or dropping frames to achieve realtime status; the timeline either plays or it doesn’t. It’s also extremely intuitive, which generates a lot of interest from educational institutions. Professors, says Yamnitsky, want to teach the craft of editing rather than any specific software tools, and the ease of use of Media 100 gives them a way to focus on technique. If you’re curious, visit the Boris FX website - for the first time, Media 100 version 12.5 is offered as a free trial.

As for Boris FX, big news for the show is that the popular Final Effects plug-ins that After Effects users have employed and loved since 1992 have been re-written from the ground up. (These too have shuttled from company to company and landed in Massachusetts at Boris FX.) Boris has rolled out new versions for the prominent platforms: Adobe in January, Apple FX Plug in February, and now Avid AVX at the show. The new versions of the plug-ins get some technology from Boris Continuum, such as the ability to apply an effect to only a small part of a frame (and then render only that portion).

Then for existing Boris FX software, Boris Blue 2.5 now gets Adobe CS3 support. The OpenGL effects plug-ins now support ATI graphics cards as well as Nvidia, opening them up beyond just Avid and into the Adobe suites.