I have an old meridien system an got a last minute project that needs to be edited on Avid. It was shot on XDCam and I want to know if the old avid can handle it before I dig up the machine and hook it up. Oh, and I plan to work only with the proxy files.

Thanks!

-O

Meridien is SD only, so no flavors of HD.  You could attach an XDCAM player, and record baseband, and choose any low-bandwidth resolution you want.  To finish in HD, however, you'll need to switch to a newer Avid.

The footage is SD and my client is planning send me just the proxies to edit an offline seq. I guess my question is, will the system be able to import the low-rez proxies?

the answer would be no.

Meridian development stopped about 6 years ago.

However, if you can get a hold of a PDW-1500, it can be set to an AV/C mode which will allow the deck to emulate a VTR for realtime playback and capture. You probably will need to toggle source on the capture tool and capture on the fly without timecode, as I don't think you'll be able to establish a channel to handle the PDW remotely. This is assuming your client still has the original source XDCAM disks.