[Mark Wheaton]

First, has Digidesign announced that they are no longer supporting AV Option? Hard to believe sincethey are owned by Avid. I think the reality is that this just wasn't ready for the 6.0 release and will follow sometime this year. And, the advantage to AVOption is that it allows opening Avid video timelines without redigitizing. Am I wrong? If this is the case, alternatives such as Firewire etc will not fill that gap, since they require either real time capture or recompressing Avid media into DV codec (which may take longer than real time and results in lower quality due to recompressing).

What would actually be nice would be a method of directly opening Final Cut and Avid DV Express timelines without having to export from those programs.

I usually just capture (in realtime) from tape. The Virtual VTR solution, quite frankly seems like overkill considering the fact that DV playback through firewire works quite well. I just finished a feature film score project.

We Captured from the composers copies of the film reels with window burn (vhs) captured via Canopus box to Final Cut as clips (each reel as one clip) Opened these 20 minute reels in PT no problem. lined up timecode and did the whole session reel by reel with not one glitch. We've done it several times before as well. I don't understand the need to resort to convoluted solutions like Virtual VTR when it is so easy.

However, If your project was done on Avid, using AV Option might be some what time saving in terms of recapture. I don't know if the cost is justified, since all it saves you is the 2-3 hour inconvenience (capture from tape time). It seems this would only be justifiable in an all Avid work flow and in those cases I would recommend staying on OS 9 until AVOption for OS X is released.