At Avid’s event last night at the Hard Rock Hotel, you certainly wouldn’t know that they didn’t have a full presence on the NAB show floor just blocks away. The company (and what looked like all of their employees in bright red shirts) rolled out the new pieces of Avid hardware as well as a look at the next version of Media Composer, v. 3.0. The plan is to ship in June and begin in full what seems like a new day at Avid. Execs from the company spoke and there was an on-stage demo before work stations around the room were unveiled with most all versions of the new hardware and software … and that included Media Composer running on Mac OSX Leopard (and Windows Vista too). Things that sparked my interest where special DVCPRO HD and HDV “modes” that allow them to run at full resolution, much more real time capability even with mixed resolutions in the same timeline and new real-time BITC features and sub-title captions.  Something small was the ability to move multiple stacked clips at once in Segment mode. I went and tried to then move non-adjacent clips on the timeline but that’s not there … yet. I had a great conversation with one of the Avid software product managers and while I won’t get into the details of our conversation at this point I think it’s safe to say that they know about little things like this (the title tool being another) and a lot of these types of things are on the radar. It’s probably more like a matter of priority for things like rock-solid performance on the hardware side and managing the resources to get things done. It really feels like things are on the right track. If some of the things we talked about come to pass in the future … there will be some great offerings out of Avid that keep on coming.