Courtesy of Avid

What do Avid's over 200 patents for professional editing, six Emmy ® Awards and an Academy Award for Technical Achievement mean to you? They mean that the same features that have made Avid editing systems the overwhelming choice of video and film professionals worldwide are available to you in Avid Xpress Pro video and film editing software.
Edit faster with the Avid editing environment
Safe at any speed. Avid Xpress Pro features the most flexible, customizable editing toolset you've ever seen. Best of all, everything is designed for speed, accuracy, and above all, the protection of your work. Key editing features include:
Fast editing. Drive edits with your mouse or your keyboard, with the fastest, most precise editing tools in the industry. In the world of Avid editing, the sequence is sacred. Avid's unique modal editing means that you can move as quickly as you need to, without looking back, safe in the confidence that you'll never accidentally move a clip or have a random typo throw your sequence out of sync. Never waste time fixing actions you never meant to perform.
Editing tools that understand editing. Here are two fast examples. Every NLE lets you copy and paste, of course. But only Avid lets you see the video you've copied to your clipboard, with complete playback and editing controls before you paste. That's right ‘ copy a clip and trim it before you paste it. Then, select a clip or group of clips and start to move them. You'll automatically switch to a four window display, showing the in and out points of what you're moving, with the frames on either side of every potential edit. Let go in your new location, and the display automatically returns to your normal view.
Powerful, easy trim tools. To begin, trim any clip, any time, with the comma and period keys. For more, step into Avid's world-famous trim mode, as easily as alt- or option-dragging a lasso across as many tracks as you want to work with, and trim all of them at once! Set up easy L-cuts by automatically trimming video and audio independently or in opposite directions together. See both sides of an edit update at the same time. Monitor the audio on either side of a trim simply by letting your mouse hover over the side you want to hear. You've never seen trim tools anything like this.
Customizable toolsets. Everything you need to do is organized for you in the Toolsets menu. Capture, color correction, audio, and editing, exactly the way you want it. Every workspace can be layed out to suit you and saved so that they reopen the same way, every time. Customize keyboard shortcuts and settings for additional controllers like the Digi 002. Change anything you want to in the interface, including how buttons are shaded ‘ really, it's all up to you. Take these settings with you and use them on any Avid system, anywhere in the world. Only Avid understands multiple users on multiple systems this well, because we know the best way to edit is your way.
Real-time Avid multicam editing. Avid offers the industry's most powerful real-time multicam editing with the industry's only mixed resolution clip groups -HD*, uncompressed SD, DV and film, each in their native format, with no transcoding required.
Automatic color correction. One-touch automatic color correction analyzes an entire sequence, and applies exactly the right correction for each individual clip, using the same tools found in the renowned Avid Symphony color corrector. You won't find anything like this anywhere else.
Image stabilization with auto-zoom. This one-step process corrects unwanted camera movement while simultaneously resizing the stabilized image to fill the frame. Doing it all in one pass saves time and preserves image quality.
Pan and Zoom with high-quality real-time preview. Toggle between viewing the animation output (the zoomed-in portion of the image only) or the whole image with a moving preview rectangle for maximum flexibility and speed.
Real-time animated alpha channels. Only Avid lets you bring movies with animated alpha channels back to your editing timeline with no additional rendering. Even animate the position, scale, and opacity of clips and add drop shadows, all in real time. Other systems don't even let you do this with additional hardware!
Unmatched media management
Spend more time editing and less time looking for your footage. Avid's media management is based on years of experience managing large projects for the world's most demanding clients, and it works. Never slow down for even the largest, most complex projects.
Intuitive, industry-leading asset management tools. Automatically identify which shots have already been used, rename a clip and automatically update every instance of the clip in every bin and sequence, and much more. The best part about Avid's media management? Most of the time you'll never notice it, because it just works.
Integrated media tracking. Advanced film and visual effects (VFX) tracking are built directly into Avid bins and timelines, including tracking of 24, 25, and 30 frame timecode, feet and frames, and film perf information. A single window tracks and displays all of this and more.
Custom metadata and Custom Sift. Out of the box, Avid Xpress Pro tracks more kinds of metadata than anyone else. You can also add as many custom fields as you want ‘ simply click in a bin column heading and type away. Use any of these provided or customized fields as the basis for media-based searches across projects and volumes to find information far beyond the reach of OS-level searches.
Powerful 24P and film features
With Academy Award winning Avid Film Composer tools built right in, you can view film metadata while you edit using industry-standard offline resolutions.
Real-time 24p pulldown, normal and advanced. Capture 24p media straight to disk over IEEE-1394, including the industry's first and only live capture of normal pulldown over 1394. And once you have your film files on disk, you can handle every possible pulldown cadence – no transcoding, wasted time and disk space, or lost timecode and metadata from destructive renders.
Script-based editing. Changes to your screenplay are automatically reflected in your editing timeline. In fact, you can edit without touching the timeline at all ‘ arrange paragraphs to arrange scenes, and trim clips when you trim words from your script. It really is that simple.
AutoSync and quarter-frame slip. The fastest, most flexible way to match film pictures with external audio sources, such as DAT and Broadcast WAV recorders and common timecode references.
Better PAL support. Quickly and easily convert between 25p PAL media and 24p media by speeding up or slowing down picture, sound, or both.

Open Timeline
It's not just that you can work with the industry's most popular formats. Only Avid Xpress Pro software allows you to combine video and film formats and resolutions in their native form, on the same timeline, in real time.
More formats. More film formats than anyone else. DV. Uncompressed SD. HD*, including DVCPRO HD, HDV*, and Avid DNxHD, among many others. Did we say more film fomats than anyone else? True, but we also mean more formats than anyone else.
Mix formats and resolutions. Drag and drop different HD, SD, DV, and film formats and resolutions into a single timeline, and work in real time, keeping each clip in its native form.
Use the industry's first HD format designed for post-production. All other HD formats are camera formats. They're not designed for compositing or animation. In fact, some of them don't have software codecs that you could render to if you wanted to. Of course, you probably wouldn't want to, since so many HD formats have limited colorspace or throw away pixels to lower their data rates. Only Avid DNxHD can stand up to whatever multi-layer, multi-generation editing and compositing you need it for, and do it in about the same bandwidth and storage space as uncompressed SD without throwing away a single pixel. So shoot in your favorite format, and do all your processing in the only HD format that's up to the task.
Mix HD formats. Mix native long-GOP HDV, native DVCPRO HD, and Avid DNxHD in the same timeline in real time, without rendering or transcoding, with output handled automatically.
Mixed-format Multicam. Real-time Avid multicam editing works just as easily with mixed DV, SD, and HD footage, or with multiple HD formats. Any group of clips, in any mix of formats, in real time.
Tapeless editing. Say goodbye to digitizing. P2* and XDCAM* aren't the only tapeless formats Avid Xpress Pro handles. FireStore and Ikegami are just two of the companies providing hard drive recorders that capture native Avid media direct to disk, ready to be mounted as Avid media drives.
Get more out of Avid Xpress Pro. When you're through editing, enjoy exceptional export flexibility to formats such as WMV HD, MPEG-4 AVC (H.264), MPEG 2, and Flash.
Integration and expandability
Robust support for industry-standard data interchange formats such as OMF, AAF, and MXF enable more seamless and extensible software integration than anyone else.
AVX 2 plug-in architecture. Deep colorspace and add advanced keyframing, including complete control over parameter curves, for both native Avid and third-party plug-in effects mean the highest resolution and most control offered by any NLE plug-in architecture.
Avid Mojo and Digidesign 002. Integrated hardware offers expanded I/O, fingertip audio and video editing control, and guaranteed performance.

Avid Unity media networks. The smartest networked storage in the business lets you connect as many Avid editors as you need, for true collaboration at any scale. Multiple editors can mount the same volumes, work on the same project, even use the same media files at the same time. Only Avid lets you do all this and more.
Avid Total Conform. Day in and day out, Avid Xpress Pro is all you need to go straight to screen. But when the time comes for an extra level of polish, you also have easy access to the world's most sophisticated video and film finishing resources. Avid's Total Conform makes it easy, fast, and affordable to apply the same professional finishing tools used on today's big-budget blockbusters. Finish best when you start right, with Avid Xpress Pro.