A year after it unveiled its Symphony Nitris HD editing platform at NAB 2005, Avid is still touting this product as its best solution for post producers working in HD, SD, or both.

Using the Avid DNxHD encoding standard to reduce bandwidth demands, Avid Symphony Nitris promises to handle two streams of uncompressed HD or eight streams of uncompressed SD with realtime color correction and motion graphics. It can even edit SD and HD footage together in the same timeline, in realtime.

Since being released, Symphony Nitris has been used to post U.S. reality shows The Casino and The Benefactor in HD. It was also used by L.A. post house Chainsaw to create SD and HD clip reels and promos for the 2006 Oscars.

‘For this year’s Academy Awards telecast, [we used] Symphony Nitris and [experienced] a greater amount of efficiency,’ said Chainsaw VP Mike Polito in a statement. ‘Assembly and editing [was] smoother than ever – particularly for HD rolls – thanks to the full conform between Symphony Nitris and our other Avid systems.’

Functionally, Symphony Nitris is immediately familiar to post producers accustomed to the Symphony user interface. This familiarity is intentional.

‘Our goal was to make the Symphony Nitris HD editing environment as similar to the Symphony experience as possible,’ says Matthew Allard, Massachusettes-based Avid’s senior product market manager. ‘The challenge for us was to add the extra necessary HD capacity under the hood, while keeping the interface and user experience as close to the SD program as possible.’

Given the plethora of HD formats, that’s a lot of extra capacity.

‘It’s relatively easy working in the analog world, where the only formats are NTSC or PAL,’ Allard explains. ‘There are many, many different formats in the HD world, and more seem to be added every day.’

Whether it’s HDCAM, HDV, or whatever new format hits the market, post facilities have to be able to deal with them all. This extra capacity requirement means that data storage on Symphony Nitris’ hardware has to be extremely flexible.

‘If you’re working with uncompressed HD video, the same length of footage requires four to six times as much storage room as the equivalent SD footage,’ says Allard. That’s why Symphony Nitris HD hardware starts with 876 GB of storage capacity, and goes up from there.

As for the future of Nitris?

‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ Allard says, laughing. ‘There’s pressure to add the ability to edit HD formats that offer both higher and lower resolution than are currently on the market. Whatever the demand, we’ll have to keep up with it with more drive space and more computing power.’

www.avid.com