Avid to offer cheaper online courses

As part of the New thinking strategi, Avid has dropped the prices on some online courses, and will offer virtual online classrooms. you can read more about it here: http://www.avid.dk/company/press/generic_intl_press.asp?taxID=4189

Per

Avid to stop Express Pro, and lower the price on media composer

Avid is going to discontinue the express pro, and lower the price of media composer to 2495 $, existing express pro costumer can upgrade for $495.
Avid is still going to have the academic price at 295$.
The lowering of the price at around 50% makes the different in price between Fincal cut and Media composer smaller, and that makes Avid more competitive.
Avid is also going to work more on communication to te customer, since that's a big wish from many customer.

Per

How to remove Final Cut Studio

If you by accident have installed Final Cut Studio2 on your mac, there is a solution for that :-) I found a cool tool that does the job for you, it removes the following:

Final Cut Pro
Motion
Soundtrack Pro
Color
LiveType
Cinema Tools
Compressor
DVD Studio Pro
Batch Monitor
Qmaster

It does not remove Your projects, render files, captured footage, your plug ins.
You can find the FCS Remover here: http://www.digitalrebellion.com/fcs_remover.htm

And remember when you have done that, go get a cop of coffee and install Avid (if it's not allready on your maschine).

Have a nice day.

Per

Avid and Sony HVR-Z7E

I have been so lucky to have 5 minutes with the new sony HVR-Z7E camera, and what a beauty, As alwyas when it comes from SAony the buttons are placed where you need them. But the reason for trying the camera was to see if the format it is recording in, could easily be imported into avid.
So the first thing was to take te files from the CF card, and import into Avid.
I started up my Media composer version 2.8, and said Import, and found one of the .m2t files.
The clip gets converted, into DNxHD and the clip I played with was 30 seconds, and it took around 5 sec. on a standard maschine.
There was no problem with editing so it seems that the workflow is easy, I will try to borrow the camera for a longer time to test more.

Per

The format war on DVD is over

It seems that the war between HD-DVD and Bluray DVD is over, now that Thoshiba has send out a press release that they will not support the HD-DVD format anymore, and recently the big supermakert Wall mart announced that they are only going to sell Blu-Ray disc it seems decicde wich format we are going to use for the next generation DVD, well until they come up with something new.
The press release can be seen here: http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSL1643184420080216

Panasonic AG-HMC150 a new AVCHD cam

At a press show the 14 of february Panasonic released some information about a new camera, the AG-HMC150 wich I guess is going to compete with the newly popular Sony XDCAM EX.The new panasonic cam records onto SD cars, in the AVCHD format.This is the list of formats it is going to support: 1080/60i, 1080/50i, 1080/30p, 1080/25p, 1080/24p native; 720/60p, 720/50p, 720/30p, 720/25p, 720/24p native; and it is 50Hz/59.94Hz switchable.
THe camera has XLR input for your microphones, USB and HDMI (d-terminal) and more.
Another camera that is goin to come from pnasonic thi fall, is the shoulder-mount AG-HMC70 the price is going to be around 2,496$ this camera is also going to the HD in the AVCHD format
Panasonics say that this is not an replacement for the HVX-200, and they are also telleing that they are going to announce another thing this april, I guess around the NAB2008 :-) so it could be that they have a new HVX-200 type camera.

Apple not at NAB this year

For a long time there has been rumors about Apple not going to NAB 2008, and now it is official, Anuj Nayar, senior manager of PR at Apple said that they are participating in fever tradeshows because ther are better ways to reach the customer, and some month ago Avid also annouced that they would not be at this years NAB, so it seems that we wont see any major news inthe videoediting world this april.
Let's see what happens with the IBC in september i Amsterdam, if Apple is going to be there or not.