Avid Liquid works with a standard OHCI FireWire port on a PC- to get output to DV you would need to add a DV deck/camera or an analogue to digital converter like Canopus ADVC110 - or with Pinnacle’s MovieBox Pro.  The latter is a specialised box which plugs into the USB port and gives you analogue in and out of Avid Liquid.  Without this card all Avid Liquid’s effects are only displayed on your PC screen until rendered.

Realtime Effects

quid Edition uses a combination of hardware and software based effects.  The hardware based effects are all the moving filters - 2D and 3D picture in picture effects, page curls, lens flares, and many of the Hollywood FX.  The software based effects are for filters like Chromakey and Lumakey, advanced colour correction, transparency etc..  This is similar to the way Matrox RT.X100 works with Premiere, however, rather than produce a dedicated PCI based card to get for this Pinnacle have used the computer’s graphic card to do the work. Graphic cards have a lot of power built-in for moving vast amounts of pixels around at high quality - designed mainly for games, of course - but Pinnacle have said why not use this power for video effects.

To output through FireWire you will also have to render all the effects, even those shown in realtime on screen.  Of course, Avid Liquid does all this rendering in the background while you work, so most or all of the effects will be rendered by the time you have finished editing.

The advantage is that you will be able to do multiple layers of effects in realtime - not just be limited to 1 or 2 layers as with most realtime cards.  The means Avid Liquid rivals Canopus’ Storm as the system with the largest number of layers of effects in realtime.

Because of this effects engine the minimum spec for an Avid Liquid 6 machine is a 2.4Ghz Pentium 4, although we would recommend a 3Ghz or even a dual processor system.

The Program

Although the level and quality of the realtime effects is important the biggest thing that distinguishes an Avid Liquid system from a Premiere based one is the program itself and it’s editing features.

Pinnacle Avid Liquid is an excellent editing program that works along similar lines to Adobe Premiere.  Originally developed by Fast for their range of broadcast editing equipment, Avid Liquid is now owned by Pinnacle,  who have brought down the price and added excellent DVD authoring. Here is a brief list of some of it's strengths:

Instant Save

The program saves the project every millisecond so that even if the power fails completely you can just restart the machine and carry on.

Background rendering

Avid Liquid will render all effects while you carry on working with no ill effects on the current project.

64 Levels of Undo per window

You can undo previous actions on each window, and these actions are also saved when the program is turned off! The new undo history will show you a list of everything you can take back.

Nest timelines within timelines

Break your project up into smaller chunks and add each one together in a new sequence, or apply an effect to a whole bunch of clips just by nesting them in a container.

Extremely customisable interface

Change the buttons, keyboard short cuts, practically everything and take these changes with you to other work stations.

Uncluttered Interface

The layout of the Windows is fixed which at first I thought was a disadvantage but now I believe is a positive boon. In Premiere and especially AVID you can become overwhelmed by windows everywhere - not so in Avid Liquid.

X-Send Clips

A special function where clips can be sent from within Avid Liquid directly to many other programs, especially, After Effects and Commotion.

Decent Audio handling

Avid Liquid splits the audio into left and right channels on the timeline so that each can be worked on individually. Also you can globally change the audio level and map the output channels to all left/right or completely mono.

High Quality effects

All the effects are sub pixel rendered so you get exceptional quality even on slow moving crawling titles.

Off-line clips

Avid Liquid is excellent at using the timecode burnt into clips and allowing you to leave clips on the tape until needed, then quickly digitising them.

Consolidate and condense

Capture all of your tape and then pick out the bits you want and delete the rest. Avid Liquid is full of excellent tools to do just that.

DVD Authoring

Write a DVD from within Avid Liquid - just press a button and Avid Liquid will encode your video and write the disc. It will even work out the data rate needed to fit the footage on the disc(!) or use the new versions built in menu facilities to create complex DVDs while you edit.

Common Questions

Can I use Premiere on the same system as Avid Liquid?

Yes, although you cannot use Premiere at the same time as Avid Liquid.  It is better to just stick to using one or the other.

Can you run Avid Liquid on two screens?

With the MovieBox Pro you can run a dual screen system using a standard graphic card (with the old Edition Pro card you needed two cards, the Pro board and a PCI card).  With the right type of card with an NVIDIA chipset you get video playback on both screens - another advantage over the old system.

Can you use MPEG clips created in other programs with Avid Liquid?

Avid Liquid does allow you to load MPEG streams and put them on the timeline to use with the DVD writing side of the program, however, it does become rather sluggish in doing so.  It is much better if left to encode video itself.  Avid Liquid’s MPEG encoding is pretty good, although it has to be said stand alone programs like Canopus ProCoder are better.

Can your Liquid-created DVD have multiple audio and video streams?

No.  You can only have one video and one audio stream. 

Does it handle AC-3?

Yes!  You can even encode a surround sound mix to 5.1 and put this on your DVD as long as you are not intending to use it commercially.  Avid Liquid’s DVD writing is not as easy to use as a program like Ulead’s DVD Workshop but the whole point is that creating your DVD becomes part of the editing process.  Chapter points are placed whilst editing and as they can be anchored to the clip, if the clips are shuffled the chapter points move as well.

Do you do training in Avid Liquid?

Yes.  We have just started offering training courses, either group or one to one.  We have also produced a DVD tutorial on V5.  Everything in this DVD holds true for version 6, just the interface looks slightly different.  We are in the process of producing some advanced DVDs to cover more of Avid Liquid's features.