PRODUCT: Avid Symphony Nitris
WEB SITE: www.avid.com
PRICING: $89,995 US MSRP
- Speed
- Safe Color Limiter plug-in
- New SpectraMatte keyer
OK, let's get a couple of things straight from the start.
One, I'm a Mac guy. I was a PC guy until I got my first Avid on two floppy
discs that only worked on an Apple IICI. My world has since changed. Two, I
work on a PC. No, I'm not happy about it, but I understand the basic core of
why the Mac was left behind in the initial round of way cooler stuff. It's OK.
I don't take it personally. So, currently, I'm on a PC using the Avid Symphony
Nitris.
Since the whole point of me writing this is to say what I
personally think of the box, let me start out with this: It totally rocks. I
beta tested both versions of it so far and can pretty much state without too
much hesitation that the box Avid promised me would be here in 1992 has finally
arrived.
REALTIME LAYERING
The majority of what I do is SD, 30i NTSC stuff. The way I
use the Symphony Nitris is realtime, 1:1 uncompressed 10-bit pictures with two
realtime titles, two two-layer matte keys over a secondary color corrected
shot, with eight tracks of checker-boarded audio with various pan and level
changes... with realtime dissolves in the midst of it all. No dropped frames.
No hiccups. And while I can't personally discuss the HD capabilities of
Symphony Nitris, I've heard from more than one source that as an HD box, it
outperforms the Nitris DS. And, yes, I've heard this from DS users.
COLOR CORRECTION
When most of us think of an Avid Symphony we think color
correction. To me it's the real reason to get a Symphony in the first place.
Symphony Nitris's secondary color correction, though not identical to the
Meridien version, has a couple of great new features — such as color cast
removal, lock vectors — either taken from the Adrenaline products or added as
cool, new things. The biggest drawback in the first version of Symphony Nitris
was the lack of a color limiter, which saved my butt many times in the Meridien
version. But the good folks at Avid have now given us a plug-in called Safe
Color Limiter that can live on the top of most layers in your sequence. While I
was apprehensive about having to add a plug-in to my sequence, it actually
performs better than the limiter of old, enabling the editor to see what areas
have problems and adjust them more smoothly that just putting a clamp on them.
It blends to safe rather than clamps at safe.
KEYING
Though I personally would have liked a realtime version of
Ultimatte in Symphony, the new SpectraMatte keyer works quite well. Isolating
the colors to be keyed is actually quite similar to the keyer in Autodesk
Discreet Flame in that you can choose a vector display called SpectraGraph to
help narrow down the key color. Its range of controls are far superior to those
of the previous chromakeyers, and the results are clean. Or you can monitor the
created alpha. I just wish there was a way to use a background plate to help
take away some of the minor disturbances. A garbage matte generator would also
be great.
SPEED
For me, aside from the bells and whistles, the most
important thing in an edit box is speed. Speed doing repetitive tasks,
scrolling, manipulating media, motion effects…simply getting the job done. The
Symphony Nitris truly keeps up with me. Renders, when needed, are extremely
fast, even in 16-bit processing mode. "Blue" dot effects render at close to
previous "Orange" dot speeds. Even
adding workspaces from my Avid Unity is faster than it once was.
OTHER COOL STUFF
A few comments about some other niceties: Fast Scrub is my
newest favorite setting. It's in the timeline hamburger menu, and once you
start using it you'll never go back. Real fast scrolling through the timeline
without the jerky updating.
For years I've had to bring in my digital audio by patching
AES into my box and capturing it that way. Now, as long as the deck I'm using
is capable of it, I can get all my tracks off the SDI audio input. Depending on
the machine, the input is changeable from 16-bit to 24-bit, with up to 16
tracks.
Speaking of audio, the interface to the "audio tool" has
changed. You can now access a full complement of audio manipulators from a
selector menu on the left-hand side of the interface, making it easier to get
to EQ or Audio Suite tools. Selecting any of the three closes the interface to
whichever tool you had open previously, so it helps save valuable screen real
estate.
So, if you need a high performance edit system that will
handle virtually all current media types, this is the system for you. Now, if
it was only available on a Mac…