Media 100 Slashes Prices and Reinvents Its Low-Cost Tools

While the rest of the Northeast was digging out from the first blizzard of the year, Media 100 executives aimed to change the climate in NLE s by repositioning the company to a broader market with radical price cuts. Moving aggressively in early December, the company slashed 60 percent off the price tag of its high-end 844/X compositor/editor and detailed the most comprehensive software revision to date, Version 3. The company launched itself into the high-stakes fight for NLE desktop market share with Media 100 HD, a Macintosh-based resolution-independent editor ( $7995).

The news came in tandem with a headcount reduction and reorganization of Media 100′s marketing department. "We’ve reduced expenses at the company pretty significantly to allow us to get really aggressive in the marketplace," said Mike Savello, recently promoted to VP of worldwide sales and marketing.

The most dramatic evidence of Media 100′s repositioning is the new G5 based SD/HD editing system- a single card that exploits the GenesisEngine developed to power the 844/X. The editor allows real-time mixing and matching of SD and HD clips in 10-bit on its timeline. A stand-out feature of the editor is its ability to perform broadcast-quality format conversions in all flavors of SD and HD internally, which Savello said is "a first" for PC-based video editors.

"Products that do format conversion today or claim to support resolution independence all cost north of $100,000," said Savello. "At $7999 the format conversion we built into this rivals standalone format converters that are available today."

Now that a top-of-the line 844/X prices out at $25,990, the system drops into the same price band as Avid’s Adrenaline. The 844/Xe real-time editing and compositing system drops from $44,995 to $19,995 while the entry-level 844/Xi system falls 60 percent from $24,995 to $9995. The XBLUR VFX option for both drops 40 percent to $5995.

The Version 3 software update for 844/X continues to mine the system’s hardware for extra power. This involves new thinking about how to use the four real-time uncompressed video streams evident in the 844/X’s new keyer. Rick Kelty, VP, product management, explained how the four pipelines are reallocated for a cleaner key: "Two of the pipelines are used to do some very sophisticated spill suppression; the other two would be used for matte erosion and matte blur, which takes advantage of the XBLUR technology."

Knitting together the product family is the guarantee of compatibility via XML, allowing an easy integration of new products into existing Media 100 workflow. This allows the new editor to handle straight-ahead editing while passing layer-intensive jobs to the 844 for real-time compositing.