There was something of a Yogi Berra moment at the Hard Rock Cafe on Sunday when Avid’s new executive VP and then the new CEO took the stage to pledge that this time we’re going to get it right.

Oh no, I thought, not another set of promises about working well with others and thinking outside the box. Well, we got those promises again. And yes there were some snickers around the floor of Hard Rock’s music venue (Avid’s traditional space over their years at NAB) at inappropriate times from the hundreds in the audience of users along with a smattering of press.

After all, neither CEO Gary Greenfield nor Kirk Arnold, executive vp and gm of Avid Video, have any video industry experience. (Give Avid’s board credit though–both of these very recent hires have solid reps for turning around high tech companies.)

Another surreal aspect to the whole event was that of course Avid wasn’t even at the show, well, officially anyway. Besides holding this Sunday event at the usual place and time as if nothing has changed, the company has holed up in the Renaissance hotel next to NAB’s South Hall for the duration of the show, holding meetings and running demos for press, its large number of users in attendance, and potential new clients alike.

So having a Sunday press conference/demo followed by food and drinks at least made the info we would be hearing easier to swallow. Some traditions would be upheld!

(Wonder how thrilled the NAB hierarchy is with companies like Avid and Apple opting out of paying exorbitant fees for booth rentals while setting up shop nearby and snatching their conference attendees? [Signs for Apple meetings could also be found around the convention.] I would imagine that NAB prez Dave Rehr et al are doing anything they can to stamp out this set me free idea from spreading to other companies now in attendance. After all, NAB makes much of its budget from this annual extravaganza. Scuttlebutt has it that Sony plunks down something like $6 million just to rent floor space, not counting the thousands of hours of planning for the show and the expense of hauling hundreds of employees to Nevada.)

Back to the Sunday press conference: We heard some pretty exciting product announcements and specifics about what the often desired and finally realized change in direction would include. Product naming was simplified, although not to the extent colleague D.W. Leitner thinks necessary. (Look for his blog; I imagine he’ll mention it.)

Price drops help a lot. Avid has looked increasingly overpriced over the past few years when compared to Apple’s quickly maturing Final Cut Studio offering. Now, Avid Media Composer (MC) with the newly designed hardware pricing around $10,000 is a pretty good deal. The demise of you-can’t-quite-figure-where-it-belongs Avid Xpress Pro is another welcome move. (The company will offer existing Xpress Pro customers a pathway to upgrade to MC software.)

And recent news such as the ability of the latest version of Avid DNxHD codecs to support alpha channels (crucial for anyone using third party apps) shows that there’s still plenty of smart thinking and good coding coming out of Tewksbury.

So what about the products announced last Sunday? Avid’s new gear really does rock: one demo moved over six streams of HD in real-time while last year’s Adreneline (now defunct) barely crept by with one stream. In fact there is real-time output of all major SD and HD formats; in the prior products you needed to first render some codecs to DNxHD.

The basic reason for the speed up is that all the new gear employs the latest PCI Express 2 (or PCIe 2.0) standard, which came out early last year. That might sound familiar to close readers: millimeter and DCP each gave 2007 Vanguard awards to Ciprico for its MediaVault 5108 series PCIe direct attached storage product, which happened to be among the very first pieces of gear to put that higher-speed standard to use. (As an aside–Current business and economic conditions, along with the cutthroat margins in the storage business, forced Ciprico to announce this past March that it would be cutting staff by 30-percent; it’s retained an investment banking firm to advise it on “strategic alternatives.”)

The new system architecture works with an outboard control box that acts as an I/O bridge, connecting to card in a Mac or PC workstation via a speedy 10Gbps bus. You can even use a laptop with a CardBus port to run this stuff on the lower end. (Whether buying a turnkey product from Avid or building your own system, it’s necessary to use the latest generation motherboards that implement the PCIe 2.0 spec.)

The architectural design tightly integrates Avid software and hardware with the CPU, host graphics card, and PCIe connection, turning the whole thing into a high performance rig. The design eliminates one of the main complaints of editors who have to sit in front of an editing system for long days and nights: the lag time in responsiveness when working with HD material. Watching a spinning hour glass for even a few seconds on a regular basis can severely disrupt your rhythm when working with a client. Users of $200k and up systems from Autodesk don’t deal with this for the most part, so it’s encouraging to see Avid deliver a solution at these much lower price points.

There’s more to talk about (including Symphony’s availability on the Mac for the first time, and full support under 64-bit Mac OSX and Microsoft Vista), but this is a blog, and most of you are too impatient to get to the next goodie. Anyway, the issue of improved performance by closely integrating and constantly tweaking hardware and software will be crucial to Avid’s success. They look to be off to a good start.

So right now I’ll finish off by giving the new pricing. All (except the lowest cost Media Composer/Newscutter software only products) include the outboard hardware I/O. Other versions as noted also include a Mac or PC workstation, although NewsCutter only works under Windows.

Media Composer (software only – $2,495); Media Composer Mojo DX (standard digital SD and HD I/O - $9,995); Media Composer Nitris DX (analog and digital I/O with Avid DNxHD encode and decode - $14,995. With an 8 core MacPro or HP xw8600 workstation starting at $21,995); Symphony Nitris DX (Now available on both Mac and Windows, $35,995 including an 8 core MacPro or HP XW8600 workstation); NewsCutter (software only $4,995); NewsCutter Mojo DX ($19,995 including an 8 core HP xw8600 workstation); and NewsCutter Nitris DX ($24,995 including an 8 core HP xw8600 workstation).