Avid Media Composer Adrenaline: Adrenaline receives a hefty upgrade.(Video Editing)(Hardware Review)(Product/Service Evaluation)

With Media Composer Adrenaline, Avid, for the first time, exploits today's multi-gigahertz CPUs rather than relying on dedicated hardware cards. At the same time, Avid has dropped prices considerably. Its Media Composer Adrenaline replaces the full line of on-line and off-line Media Composers priced two to three times higher (although Avid will still support and develop for Meridien systems). But, the only hardware Media Composer requires now, aside from a qualified workstation, is the Adrenaline accelerator.

Because the Meridien hardware enabled Media Composer to edit two streams of full-frame uncompressed video in real time, losing it may seem frightening. Leveraging the work Intel has been doing to increase processor speeds, Avid's release amazingly plays five simultaneous streams of uncompressed video in the timeline on a 2.8GHZ workstation using only the CPU and Adrenaline. Avid's benchmark of five layers of uncompressed video is admittedly an approximation; the number of simultaneous layers that Adrenaline can play ultimately depends on what each layer is and how much effects processing is called for in each. On a 2.8GHZ test system, I consistently could preview five layers and often got up to eight.

When working with SD media, Adrenaline has little onboard processing (until HD expansion capability is added this year). Intel and the OpenGL graphics card do most of the heavy lifting. It does have professional I/O, including four-channel XLR audio in and out, as well as AES/EBU and S/PDIF. Of course, it has professional BNC component video, S-Video, and composite and reference sync, in addition to LTC timecode and two 1394 ports, a 4-pin and a 6-pin.

The FireWire ports hold a lot of Adrenaline's power. The &pin connector is the link to the Media Composer workstation, carrying digitized video and audio back and forth from Adrenaline to the CPU. The 4-pin port connects to a DV camcorder or deck. Adrenaline hardware does the encoding and decoding for both capturing media and displaying it on a preview or output monitor. Adrenaline maintains accurate clock and timing control so that any preview is locked to the position of the sequence-window play bar.

Off-loading digitizing and encoding from the CPU is a huge advantage. It allows the host computer to work directly on number crunching in the sequence window, particularly with DV material, which would otherwise need to be uncompressed and recompressed constantly. Media ...