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DOES THE PROMISE OF NATIVE HD EDITING DELIVER?
Pinnacle's Liquid line of nonlinear editors started life as technology from FAST Electronic, a German company acquired by Pinnacle in September 2001. Liquid Edition is the younger sibling of the flagship product, Liquid blue, which FAST introduced under the name Blue as an all-format NLE designed to compete with Avid.
I conducted this review a week before the start of NAB but after the announcement that Avid has agreed to acquire Pinnacle Systems. Quite honestly, the future life of Liquid is unknown. It will take months for the deal to be finalized. For now, the companies are operating under a business-as-usual policy. Part of Avid's justification for purchasing Pinnacle is Pinnacle's strength in consumer sales channels. Since Liquid Edition is marketed as both a consumer and professional product, fans of the software can only hope that Avid lets it flourish after the dust settles. Not only does the software offer an interface based on the standard Avid-style source/record/timeline window layout, it offers many integrated technologies that go a step beyond most competitors, including Avid.
Pinnacle's Liquid line of editors includes the standard and professional versions of Liquid Edition, as well as Liquid (known previously as Liquid Edition Broadcast, Liquid blue and Liquid chrome HD), a real-time, multiformat HD/SD video editing system for broadcast that ships with configurable I/O formats and options. (Customers have a choice of analog and digital I/O including uncompressed SD/HD-SDI, multi-speed SDTI and HDV/DV.) Liquid Edition is a software-only NLE targeted at the same market segment as Adobe Premiere Pro, Avid Xpress DV and Sony Vegas; Liquid Edition PRO competes primarily with Avid Xpress Pro.
Liquid Edition PRO includes the PRO breakout box, which is similar to Avid's MoJo and AJA's Io LA. The PRO breakout box adds analog input/output capabilities to the software-only standard version, which can capture and output using 1394 (FireWire). It's not just a high-quality A-D/D-A converter-it also includes audio outputs to send six discrete audio feeds for 5.1 monitoring during surround mixing with Liquid Edition. There is also S/PDIF digital audio I/O. Unlike other breakout boxes, the Liquid PRO unit connects via plug-and-play USB 2.0, leaving your computer's 1394 ports free to connect to external FireWire drives.
LIQUID...