As reported in previous newsletters, Avid Liquid 7.2 will be the last version and a new product will take its place probably in 2009. There is one patch currently being worked on to let Liquid work with the new DirectX 10 graphics cards, which are also pretty much the only ones you can buy these days, so the fix was needed so that people could keep using Liquid. Beyond this patch, no further improvements are likely - support for new formats like AVCHD and XDCam-EX or Blu-ray will certainly never be added.

So if you need this kind of format support you will need to look somewhere else and Adobe and Canopus are both tempting Liquid users with offers on their software. Avid have now produced an upgrade from Liquid to Media Composer - a very good idea in many respects! Liquid was designed as an 'Avid beater' when it was first developed, so it works in very similar ways to Media Composer. Plus Media Composer is a definite 'step up' from Liquid, with the addition of decent compositing and painting tools as part of the package plus Blu-ray writing from Avid DVD.

Avid will give you £620.00 off the price of Media Composer, or Media Composer together with one of the new hardware bundles, the Mojo NX or the Nitris NX. This is an excellent offer however you look at it - not least that they are giving us the same $1000 dollar discount as in the US, which is a much better deal than we normally get in the UK! Plus even if you bought a Liquid Pro you are effectively getting your money back against a purchase of a new Avid system.

So what considerations are there for people wanting to switch from Liquid to Media Composer? Above all, switching does involve making sure that your computer can cope with Media Composer, and there are various other issues. We will be putting more advanced information on our website in the next few weeks but the best way to find out more would be to come to our DVC open day on 23rd July. If you plan on attending please register, as it will help us to judge the numbers and we can always let you know if we have to shift the day, just in case we do not have Media Composer 3 by then!

This offer is effective now but we strongly recommend that you do not take advantage of it until v3 of Media Composer arrives. Anyone buying Media Composer now will get a free upgrade to version 3 when it arrives - however, we are less sure about what happens with the other software that comes with Media Composer (Avid DVD, Boris Continuum and Sorenson Squeeze). You may not get free updates on these pieces of software, which means that you would not have the ability to write Blu-ray discs that will be in the next Avid DVD (and is not included currently).

Media Composer 3 is expected in the middle of this month, so theoretically any minute now....