Avid Delivers Support for XDCAM HD 50 Mb/s Format

Avid Technology announced qualification of the Sony XDCAM HD MPEG 2 Long GoP 50 Mb/s format in its Media Composer, NewsCutter and Symphony product lines. Customers will be able to increase the speed and quality of productions by working with full raster 1920x1080 HD media in a 4:2:2 color space. The functionality is available via a free software upgrade for all Avid customers running version 3.0 of Media Composer and Symphony and version 7.0 of NewsCutter software.

With this release, Avid Media Composer, NewsCutter and Symphony products now support the Sony PDW-700 and PDW-HD1500 cameras for ingest at all bit rates (50Mbps for both 1080i and 720p) and frame rates of 1080 50i, 59.94i and 720p. Working in the Sony XDCAM HD 50 Mb/s format will enable customers to leverage the benefits of Avid's existing interoperability -- such as support for XDCAM HD proxies, native MXF media support, real-time multi-format editing and variable frame rate support.

Customers must upgrade to version 3.0.5 of Media Composer and Symphony or version 7.0.5 of NewsCutter software to receive these updates as well as ingest and edit capabilities for the Sony XDCAM HD 50 Mb/s format.

Source: Avid