During IBC 2012, Avid announced an update to their Media Composer family of software. Introducing Media Composer 6.5, Symphony 6.5, and NewsCutter 10.5.

Avid® today announced the latest release of its industry-leading video editing tools, Media Composer® 6.5, Symphony® 6.5, and NewsCutter® 10.5, providing fast, open workflows that greatly advance editing efficiency.

This comes as Adobe announced a new product coming soon called Adobe Anywhere.

Here’s what’s new with the Media Composer family:

Media Composer 6.5, Symphony 6.5, and NewsCutter 10.5 offer key enhancements that enable customers to speed up their workflow efficiency:

Avid Media Authoring — Customers in facilities who handle a variety of input formats and deliver multiple output formats can now master and archive projects more efficiently with Avid Media Authoring. This new component of Avid Media Access (AMA) offers support for AS-02, a standard developed by the Advanced Media Workflow Association that helps post-production facilities simplify efficient media management for versioning of programs and streamline delivery to a variety of platforms and devices. And with the addition of natively supporting the JPEG 2000 codec, customers can package sequences for easy versioning and archiving, as well as scale sequences to meet the needs of multiple generational content passes—without media degradation. The Media Composer 6.5 family of products also supports Active Format Description (AFD) to enable one consistent viewer experience—regardless of down-conversion or reformatting.

I/O Hardware Release — With the I/O Hardware Release control in Media Composer, Symphony and NewsCutter, customers using third-party hardware through Avid Open I/O can further customize their workflows. Editors can now simply activate and deactivate hardware to pass control back and forth between Media Composer and third-party applications such as Adobe After Effects or Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve. In addition, editors can now access software-only mode features, such as full-screen playback, directly in Media Composer without disconnecting.

Audio enhancements — The industry leading audio tools in Media Composer, Symphony and NewsCutter take a leap forward with significant new enhancements. The addition of advanced audio keyframing accelerates the automation process within and among audio tracks. And with support for 64 audio voices, video editors gain more power to work with multiple stem mixes and play them all back simultaneously.

Advanced relink support — Editors gain more flexibility to interact with media from third-party applications, such as DaVinci Resolve, through expanded relink support, enabling them to dynamically reconnect clips to new or the original media using a wide variety of common metadata fields.

Looks like some great features. And what’s even better is Media Composer 6.5, Symphony 6.5, and NewsCutter 10.5 are all available now!