This week at the ACA (Avid Customer Connect) event in Vegas, Avid® made several key announcements around Avid Everywhere™, the company’s strategic vision for the media and entertainment industry, centered on connecting creative professionals and media organisations with their audiences in more powerful, efficient, collaborative, and profitable ways. The company introduced its new Avid MediaCentral Platform and set of modular application suites that together represent the most open, integrated, and flexible media production and distribution environment in the industry.
“The media industry is going through a period of unprecedented change and needs a leader to step forward with a clear vision for the future,” stated Avid President and CEO Louis Hernandez, Jr. “Our Avid Everywhere vision uniquely solves the key issues facing the industry. By getting on the Avid MediaCentral Platform today, broadcast, video, and audio customers can strategically address both their current and future needs, with complete choice over how, when, and where they deploy and scale their solutions.”
The new MediaCentral Platform is an open, extensible, and customisable foundation that enables customers to streamline their entire workflow—from media creation to distribution and monetisation—with greater flexibility, choice, and security. By fostering an open approach, the MediaCentral Platform provides a standardised foundation that connects media creators and distributors together, regardless of who makes the tools they use. This fundamentally changes how media organisations and professionals operate, providing greater flexibility to choose solutions and easily customise and scale complete end-to-end workflows tailored to meet specific needs.
Building on the Avid Everywhere strategic vision, Avid has reorganised its existing hardware and software products and introduced new solutions in three suites, all built upon the MediaCentral Platform. With on-premises and cloud-enabled deployment options, as well as subscription, floating, and perpetual licensing, customers now have greater choice over how they use Avid solutions.
- Artist Suite encompasses all of the products and tools used to create content, including digital audio workstations (DAW), music notation software, control surfaces, live sound systems, video editing solutions, and graphics creation systems.
- Media Suite includes all of the tools and services used to manage, protect, distribute, and monetise media, including solutions for newsroom management, asset management, and multiplatform distribution. Over time, the Media Suite will expand to include metadata tagging, protection and encryption, and analytics.
- Storage Suite refers to all of the products and tools used to capture, store, and deliver media, including online storage, nearline storage, and ingest/playout servers.
Avid is developing the MediaCentral Platform and application suites to uniquely solve the needs of broadcast, pro video, and pro audio customers by offering a comprehensive ecosystem that encompasses every aspect of the digital media value chain—from media production, collaboration, and management, to distribution, monetisation, and data analysis.
Avid Everywhere for Broadcast and Media
The Avid Everywhere vision enables broadcast and media customers to:
- Streamline disparate workflows using the MediaCentral Platform
- Access media everywhere with powerful media asset management solutions
- Collaborate using cloud-enabled video production
- Effortlessly distribute content to a variety of web, mobile, and social channels
- Deploy and scale workgroups as needed using flexible subscription and floating licenses
Avid Everywhere for Video
The Avid Everywhere vision enables post-production facilities and independent video editors to:
- Expand their productions using the MediaCentral Platform
- Manage massive amounts of media using advanced media management solutions
- Leverage talent everywhere by collaborating via the cloud
- Accelerate high-resolution editorial workflows
- Deploy and scale workgroups as needed using flexible subscription and floating licenses
Avid Everywhere for Audio
At NAB 2014, Avid will preview several key technological innovations that will enable artists, producers, engineers, sound designers, and remixers to:
- Collaborate via the cloud
- Monetise their content through an interactive, online audio marketplace that facilitates connections, creation, and commerce
- Manage, track, and document assets using an open, universal metadata schema
- Store and archive work locally or in the cloud
New Product Innovations
Underscoring the company’s ongoing innovation and leadership, Avid is also showcasing several market-leading product innovations and new technology previews at NAB 2014:
- MediaCentral Platform
- Avid MediaCentral Connectivity toolkit —Avid is working with third-party developers and technology partners to integrate their tools and services into the MediaCentral Platform, providing customers with a wealth of product and service choices that all work and communicate with each other seamlessly.
- Avid MediaCentral | UX—Enables customers to easily access the MediaCentral Platform through a web-based, front-end interface, which provides a unified experience. With MediaCentral | UX, customers can access media and work on projects across the platform, with the choice of using a laptop, desktop computer, or mobile device
- Artist Suite
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- Media Composer® | Cloud—Extends real-time production everywhere by enabling Media Composer editors to connect to Interplay | Production systems remotely and access, edit, and collaborate with others as if they were in the same location.
- Media Composer subscription and floating licensing —Customers now have greater choice in how they use Media Composer, with subscription and floating licensing options that enable greater flexibility and value.
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- Media Suite
- Media | Director—Timesaving media ingest module that automates the process of ingesting media into production and nearline storage, enabling users to start editing immediately and accelerate project turnaround.
- Media | Distribute—Enables organisations to create content once and deliver it to multiple destination platforms, with extended integration to even more third-party online video, social media, video transcoding, and web content management systems.
- Media | Index—Streamlines workflows and enhances collaboration by enabling customers to search for, audition, and move media across multiple Interplay | Production databases, both local and remote, regardless of where the assets are stored.
- Storage Suite
- 4K support—The entire ISIS storage family now supports collaborative 4K and Ultra HD workflows.
- ISIS® | 2500 —Avid’s latest nearline shared storage system offers higher storage capacity, making it easier to store large volumes of high-res assets and repurpose content. Featuring an easily scalable architecture, ISIS | 2500 offers post-production, broadcast, education, and corporate facilities greater cost savings per terabyte.
Avid Demonstration at NAB 2014
Excerpts from Press Release
