Avid Retires DS
Avid has announced that DS, or Digital Studio, formerly from SoftImage, and much beloved by a select group of finishing editors, is now at End of Life. They will support it with bug fixes for another year, but after that, it’s history. They are giving DS 11 customers a license to MC (but not Symphony), and are offering reduced pricing on Eyeon products, which provide powerful node-based compositing, a hallmark of DS.
With this announcement, Avid no longer offers a finishing solution with capabilities beyond HD. Smoke is probably the closest current product. Like DS, it offers a full editing toolset, as well as powerful effects and finishing capabilities.
Scott Simmons provides preliminary details on the Pro Video Coalition site along with a detailed FAQ provided by Avid’s Marianna Montague.
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Splice Now 
August 7, 2013 at 3:04 pm
Well, if Avid want´s to compete in future with other products, i hope they implement the “effect tree” into MC. The best of both world´s. Best Editing tool and an excellent fx tool.
August 7, 2013 at 3:22 pm
Node-based effects. We can only hope. Raster sizes above 1920 would be on the list, too.
August 8, 2013 at 11:36 am
As long as the (last) product manager of Avid DS states, that node based editing is “out” there will be for sure no trees in MC or other Avid products…
If there is anybody out there who has influence on HR decisions at Avid, please fire this guy…
Karl
August 8, 2013 at 1:56 pm
[…] more details on the retirement of Avid DS over at SpliceNow and […]
August 9, 2013 at 5:39 pm
Avid should take this opportunity to offer the Eyeon deal to all of it’s customer base, not merely those affected by the EOL DS product.
They have for the most part, created an Avid island, trapping users. It’s no big deal to purchase additional products to support a full workflow, but shouldn’t they really take the initiative to fully support that concept!?
I love the relational aspect of Symphony, but even their own panel doesn’t support it. Baselight has a wonderful color plug, but who wants to use it to color correct hundreds / thousands of shots, if you have to step in and out of it on a clip by clip basis?
You either support current or better yet, future methodologies or you die. I’ve used Avid almost exclusively since 1991. It’s the same basic program with a few notable exceptions, scriptsync, phrasefind etc… FCP is not the answer for me, but Avid, while stable, is not speaking to me the same way it used to.
September 8, 2013 at 8:49 am
I find it ironic that for a company that makes editing products, that “timing” is not their thing. It would seem that with 4K now the talk, you would either keep a solution that can handle it until you have something to replace it. Same thing with the two screen experience. Remove all MetaSync functionality in v6 when that starts becoming a viable platform for transmedia and advertising. Timing, timing, timing…
MichaelP