Back in the early days of non-linear video editing Avid was the king. Their software was used in pretty much every situation and they dominated the post-production landscape for film and TV.

Then, Apple came out with Final Cut Pro and things changed. Plus, Avid ended up having some issues of its own which hindered it further.

Now, with Apple having issues with Final Cut Pro X, Avid has released its first application to compete with Apple’s iMovie mobile. The app is called Avid Studio for the iPad and is currently available in the App Store for an introductory price of $4.99. After 30 days it will increase to $8.

With this app just being released, its too early to tell if it will knock Apple’s iMovie off its perch as the iOS editing app du jour. However, it does have some nice features and a few iMovie doesn’t have, so chances are people will at least give it a chance — especially at that low price point.

We know, we know, Apple announced all this new cool stuff yesterday. Sadly, we were having some technical problems here at the site yesterday and we didn’t get a chance to bring you the news about what the company announced. So, in the interest of thoroughness, here’s what Apple had to say. Get your credit cards ready.

First up is the new version of Apple’s Mac OS X operating system. This version, known as OS X 10.7 or Lion, sports the following new features and enhancements:

• Multitouch gesture support
• App Store: Mac apps available in a centralized location with a payment system, 1-click purchasing, customer reviews, screenshots, etc
• Launchpad – app home screens for OS X
• Full-screen apps
• Auto-save and auto-resume within apps
• Mission Control: unification of full-screen apps, Expose, Spaces and Dashboard

Lion will launch this coming Summer, though no specific release date was provided. The Mac App Store will be available within 90 days, however, as an addition to Snow Leopard.

Next, let’s turn to Apple’s suite of applications called iLife. As expected, the suite was updated to give us the new iLife ’11.

Here’s the specs:

Yesterday, the good folks at Apple were kind enough to update their flagship image handling software Aperture to version 3.0.2 and today the updates keep on coming with the release of an update to iMovie, which brings the application to version 8.0.6. The update “improves reliability when working with videos from Aperture and requires Mac OS X 10.5.6 or later and iLife ’09.” It is 35.84 MB and available via Software Update.

Also updated, just not by Apple, was Flip4Mac‘s free Windows Media player, which brings it to version 2.3.2. In case you’re not familiar, Flip4Mac is a QuickTime plugin that lets you watch Windows Media files in a QuickTime Player. It’s a great tool that’s saved the day more than once when standard Quicktime won’t open a video file. The new update fixes problems playing back files and streams with MP3 content and corrects problems launching QuickTime Player if you’re using Snow Leopard.

In addition to Flip4Mac’s player, Perian was also updated to 1.2.1. Perian is a QuickTime plugin that allows you to play pretty much any kind of media through QuickTime Player. This particular update adds Indeo 5 decoding and fixes some pesky bugs that seem to crop up from time to time.

Have any trouble with these updates? Let us know in the comments.