Avid DS 10 is out there
 

DS just got an upgrade. Avid is releasing version 10 in September, so they said at the event in Hollywood on Wednesday: HDhead Avid Announces the Release of DS v10

They showed some pretty cool stuff. RGB real time playback, 2k real time primary and secondary color correction, AFE conform from DPX files and lots of other little things. The workstation the DS is running on is very fast.

And from the article, it looks like they're still running on XP as their OS. Interesting. Thats a lot of computing power too - a pricey turnkey system at 69k. Still, I expect they'll sell enough.

You also have 3-D LUT's. Essentially, it seems like they did a very significant upgrade to v8.4, got rid of the DS hardware and bundled a software only version with bleeding edge workstation, monitor and storage.

That said, the v8.4 Assist Station (software only version) sold for $10k. You are getting very nice hardware w/ v10, but not $40k worth.

But it seems like DS needed to go in this direction to make the entire system more affordable.

No doubt that $40K+ is expensive but at $69K+ they have cut the price from about $125K.

The thing that I found disappointing is that they didn't port it to MAC OSX or even Vista.
XP is already end of life. I bet it would run really fast on MAC.

I'm not to sure if there would be any significant point to port it yet since it's already runs in 64 bit environment. XP 64bit also is more like the 2003 server as it's the same kernel, or based on the same.

XP is nearing its end of life, but I'm not sure if xp 64 bit is since it's aimed at more complex user groups that don't change OS to often. Still systems that run Win2k out there....