After its acquisition by Avid, DS was always positioned as a high end video finishing tool.

The toolset in DS offered video timeline editing, an object-oriented vector-based paint tool, 2D layer compositing, sample based audio and starting with version 3.01 of the product, a 3D environment.

A Softimage DS user could quickly go from editing, to paint, to compositing with a few mouse clicks all inside the same interface.

Some of the lacking features were quickly resolved, within months of version 1.0 a new chroma keyer was released.

On July 7, 2013, Avid sent out an email marking the end of life of the DS product.

As part of this transition, we will be ceasing future development of Avid DS with a final sale date of September 30th, 2013" Up until version 10.5, DS was sold as a turn-key system; the software was not available without purchasing CPU, I/O and storage hardware from Avid.

StudioZ single stream: Intergraph TDZ-425 with 30 minutes of uncompressed SCSI storage.

StudioZ dual stream: Intergraph TDZ-2000 GT1 with one hour of fibre channel storage.

This allowed a system at the time to play back dual-stream uncompressed HD effects in real-time at 16-bit precision.