Avid DS - Hardware

Hardware

Up until version 10.5, DS was always sold as a turn-key system. Over time, there have been many hardware refreshes.

StudioZ single stream: Intergraph TDZ-425 with 30 minutes of uncompressed SCSI storage. CPUs at the time were Pentium II/300 MHz.

StudioZ dual stream: Intergraph TDZ-2000 GT1 with one hour of fibre channel storage. CPUs on first systems were Pentium II/400 MHz, but last shipping systems had Pentium III/1 GHz. DS was one of the first applications to show that real-time effects could be processed with just the CPUs of the system, not requiring special video cards with real-time effect hardware.

Equinox: Developed by Avid, it was one of the first uncompressed HD video cards available. Systems were available on CPUs from Pentium III/1 GHz to Pentium 4/2.8 GHz. Storage was typically SCSI, but fibre channel was also supported.

Nitris DNA: Developed by Avid, the Nitris hardware was probably the largest hardware update to the system since it was released. 10-bit HD and SD support was standard. Real-time down and cross convert. This was the only hardware for DS that had on-board effect processing. This allowed a system at the time to play back dual-stream uncompressed HD effects in real-time at 16-bit precision. This was also the first hardware from Avid to support the DNxHD codec. Starting with Pentium 4, Intel Core Xeons were supported. SCSI storage was primarily used.

AJA: First available as a 4:4:4 option to be used in conjunction with Nitris hardware. Current DS systems use the AJA Kona 3 (Xena 2K) card as the only I/O for the system. Current systems ship with two Intel Core Xeon 6-core processors. SAS is the recommended storage for these systems.