Avid VP: company not abandoning the Mac (online at: http://www.maccentral.com/news/9904/27.avid.shtml)
(This is the first of a two-part story based on a MacCentral interview with Paul Henderson, Avid's vice president of product marketing for editing products.)
Although there are some problems on the high-end side of the equation, Avid Technology Inc., is not abandoning the Mac on any fronts, according to Paul Henderson, Avid's VP of product marketing for editing products. He denies that Avid has decided to stop developing Mac versions of Avid Xpress and Media Composer.
Media Composer is Avid's line of offline/online editing systems. Last week at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), the company revealed Media Composer 8.0 - and version 9.0 for Windows NT. Avid Xpress is a system for creating high-quality digital media content.
Henderson says that while he can't talk about upcoming versions of products, there would be other Mac releases of Xpress and Media Composer. He added that it was also false that the company would only be providing support through version 8.0.
"Our current plan is to add capabilities to our entire product line, particularly in the area of interoperability," Henderson says. "We expect many of our customers to be working in a multiplatform world, and we want them to be able to efficiently move back and forth between platforms."
During the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) expo in Las Vegas last week, it was widely reported that there would be no major Mac releases after the latest versions of Express and Media Composer.
A variety of reasons were given for this much-reported decision: corporate fall-out between Apple and Avid; Microsoft and Intel investing in Avid; Windows NT's "across the board" support of OpenGL; the high expenses of rewriting code to run on the upcoming Mac OS X; and the Mac's limited number of PCI slots.
However, Henderson says Avid continues to work closely with Apple at "all levels of the product line." He says the "misinformation" about Avid's direction resulted from the company's announcement of a Windows NT version of Media Composer for the first time. Avid also announced that the NT version would have capabilities the Mac version doesn't have.
"We want the Mac community to understand that Avid will continue to support the Mac going forward even though we have significant development for the NT platform going on," Henderson said. "There's clearly a lot of Mac investment at Avid. Over the last year, we're spent tens of millions of dollars investing in the platform when you consider Media Composer 7.0, our PCI extender chassis, the Media Composer XL 8.0 launch, and Unity."
The Meridien video subsystem is Avid's state-of-the-art processing and I/O subsystem for video, audio, graphics and effects management. It's the core of Avid's top-tier nonlinear editing systems on both Macintosh and Windows NT platforms.
Unity MediaNet is open networking and central storage technology that supports real-time, simultaneous sharing of high-bandwidth media and lets dedicated systems offload media-management and media-manipulation tasks. Due in the second quarter, it will support file sharing among Mac, Windows NT and SGI IRIX systems, as well as among networking technologies such as ATM, Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel. Media Composer XL 8.0 for G3 and Windows NT systems is also coming in the second quarter.
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