Improving efficiency in workflows and maximizing asset value: Avid's main objectives

One of Avid's highlights at this NAB is Nexis, the new generation of software-defined shared storage with bandwidths of up to 9.6GB/s and scalable from 20TB to 1.4PB.

Avid NAB 2016 kicked off this Saturday with the celebration of its now traditional Avid Connect event. Jeff Rosica, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, was in charge of welcoming the more than a thousand participants from 600 companies from 52 countries participating in these sessions that take place at the Wynn hotel in Las Vegas.

Louis Hernández Jr, CEO of Avid, commented that these types of conferences are essential to take the pulse of the industry and analyze the changes that the industry is experiencing and how to face them. One of the aspects he most emphasized was the need to improve efficiency in workflows and maximize the value of assets with a view to distributing across multiple channels and devices, and increasing the possibility of creating high-quality content.

An example of the silent revolution that the sector is experiencing is that, in the last ten years, the content creation ratio has multiplied by four, distribution platforms by ten and consumption has grown by 50%. However, as Hernández highlighted, budgets for media technology have only grown by 3-4%.

He also gave another example of these rapid changes, in this case in the music market. The iTunes catalog has grown by 438%, increasing the number of artists creating music by 77%. On the contrary, the income for these artists has decreased by 40%.

Hernández highlighted that Avid is prepared to take on all these new challenges and help creatives, producers and broadcasters create more and better content on more platforms. The company began a new stage in 2013, initiating an ambitious take-off plan in 2015. Now, the results of this new policy are beginning to be seen more clearly, and it is expected that in 2017 Avid will grow strongly in profits.

Hernández has put on the table in this Avid Connect some of the latest projects carried out such as RTVE (Spain), Televisa (Mexico) or Sinclair Broadcast Group (USA).

Avid MediaCentral

Avid has announced a series of breakthrough innovations for its Avid MediaCentral platform and its associated modular integrated applications that further develop the core promises of Avid Everywhere. These innovations address the media industry's biggest challenges, so everyone – from individual artists and creative teams to the largest media companies – can create, distribute and manage content more efficiently and cost-effectively using a single common platform.

“Avid MediaCentral Platform, with more than 32,000 users worldwide and a rapidly expanding partner environment, is the most open, extensible and customizable base of common services,” said Louis Hernández.

The platform provides a series of integrated applications, collaboration tools, flexible licensing and deployment options, resolution independence, third-party connectivity and more, offering the most open, flexible and comprehensive solutions for content creation, management and distribution.

Graphics

Among Avid's new features at NAB 2016, we find a strong commitment to creating cutting-edge graphics to broadcast news and more content. The new 4Designer graphics creation software offers a complete solution for creating 2D and 3D motion graphics in a wide variety of resolutions. This feature-rich toolset gives broadcasters the tools they need to create stunning, real-time visual content for news, elections, sporting events, weather segments, business reports, and more. As the successor to the award-winning 3Designer, 4Designer offers greater power, speed and new features in a modern interface, while maintaining the same workflows and compatibility with existing 3Designer templates.

For accelerated sports graphics production, the new Avid Spark telestration tool allows live commentators to draw and add graphics to a video in real time, providing audiences with better visual information on key plays and game flow and analysis. Designed to operate quickly, Avid Spark offers multi-option capabilities to speed and simplify graphics production. An easy-to-use touchscreen interface eliminates the need for a dedicated operator. Unlike traditional telestrators, Avid Spark allows users to draw graphics in on-screen and field perspectives, ensuring a realistic viewing experience. Ideal for small to medium-sized operations, Avid Spark helps broadcasters produce better gameplay images, attract a larger audience, and deliver more engaging content that stands out from the competition.

Separately, Avid has announced new innovations that help customers reduce the burden of making disparate technologies work together so they can focus on creating great content. The recently expanded Avid Connectivity Partner Program offers new services, toolkits and certification programs that help developers bring Avid-certified solutions to market, while the new Avid Enterprise Marketplace helps media professionals and companies immediately access solutions from a convenient central location.

Avid Nexus

One of Avid's highlights at this NAB is Nexis, the new generation of software-defined shared storage with bandwidths of up to 9.6GB/s and scalable from 20TB to 1.4PB.

Avid Nexis enables fully virtualized storage so media companies can adjust storage capacity mid-project without disrupting workflows. Nexis, powered by the Avid MediaCentral platform, offers unparalleled flexibility, scalability and media control for Avid and third-party workflows. It is designed to serve the smallest production teams as effectively as the largest media companies and is the only storage platform with the flexibility to grow with your customers in every phase of their business, fulfilling a key Avid Everywhere principle.

Because Avid Everywhere is so open, Avid Nexis works with all major authoring applications, including Media Composer, Pro Tools, Apple Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro, Grass Valley Edius, and many more. Production teams can quickly access a pool of virtualized storage resources, dramatically increasing their efficiency.

Nexis' software-defined storage architecture is what allows customers to select components that fit their current needs and easily expand storage capacity and bandwidth as their business grows. Avid Nexis is also the only scalable storage solution that allows customers to dynamically tune the system to ensure high-priority workflows always have the levels of capacity, performance, and data protection they require. Customers can provide maximum performance to critical projects, while slowing down less critical workflows. This capability allows teams to react quickly to changes, adjusting performance and protection levels to match a project's needs at any stage of the workflow.

Avid Nexis' unique modularity allows teams to mix and match storage engines and elastically expand capacity from as small as 20 TB to more than 1.4 PB in a single system, without any service interruption or downtime. All Avid Nexis systems are powered by the Nexis FS file system, so customers enjoy consistent performance, reliability and protection, regardless of configuration size.

The new Avid Nexis family includes: E4 (high-density integrated storage engine), E2 (compact integrated storage engine), System Director Appliance (increases size and redundancy), Media Pack (pack of ten hard drives with 20 TB or 60 TB of storage), Redundant Controller (high availability option for Nexis systems), and Nexis Pro (professional integrated storage engine).
This storage solution is emerging as a successor to the popular Isis 1000.

Bet on IP environments

At Avid Connect, Avid has announced a plan to accelerate the industry's transition to IP environments by supporting real-time IP signals based on the Avid MediaCentral platform with content delivery in a unified environment for converged file-based media workflows and live signals. At its booth at NAB, Avid is demonstrating native IP-based workflows as well as hybrid SDI/IP workflows that will allow broadcasters to leverage their standard IT infrastructure during this transition process.

Avid MediaCentral is now expanding to support emerging open technology standards for the delivery of professional audio and video streams over standard IP networks. Future updates to this platform will enable Avid customers to orchestrate automated content flows that span all facets of content creation and media distribution, incorporating Avid tools and infrastructure, as well as solutions from a growing ecosystem partners. By integrating file-based workflows with live feed-based workflows, Avid aims to complete the digitalization of the entire value chain allowing new workflows to be innovated.

At Avid they are aware that most large-scale broadcasters and production companies continue to use SDI and coaxial cabling to transport signals in real time. In recent years, however, rapid technological advances have made it possible to pass audio and video signals over standard IP networks, and the industry is beginning a migration toward an agnostic infrastructure capable of supporting new emerging image formats, including UHD and HDR.

At the Avid booth we can see demonstrations of real IP flows with partners such as Grass Valley or Sony, as well as demonstrations of IP interfaces for Avid products that have historically supported SDI signals such as Media Composer.
In addition, Avid has announced its support for open technology standards such as the AIMS Alliance, an alliance that Avid has just joined.

Support for Panasonic AVC Long-G

Avid has introduced the industry's first end-to-end production workflow for the Panasonic AVC Ultra-LongG video format, including full integration with solutions across the Avid MediaCentral Platform. With comprehensive support from the MediaCentral Platform, production teams can now benefit from this highly effective compression program in the most efficient way using highly integrated, streamlined workflows.

Many broadcasters and production companies around the world are currently recording in AVC Ultra-LongG, achieving high quality material with low bandwidth. With the support of Avid MediaCentral, production teams will now be able to benefit from this modern and highly efficient compression scheme and with an optimized and highly integrated workflow.

Some of the world's largest broadcasters are already using the Panasonic AVC-long-G format, including NBC and Cox Media, with many others poised to adopt the format very soon. For this reason, Avid has opted to support this efficient format from its Avid Artist, Media, and Storage Suites solutions, including baseband and file-based ingestion, editorial and logging, send-to-playback and archive.

These are the solutions that will support AVC-longG, thus accelerating the workflow and unifying and coordinating different aspects: Media Composer, Avid Nexis, Interplay Production, Interplay MAM, speed 5500, Media Director and Media Central UX.

Collaborative Pro Tools

As far as Pro Tools is concerned, the new version 12.5 confirms Avid's commitment to offering powerful workflows that connect artists, media professionals and their works in a much more collaborative and efficient way so they can focus on creating their best work. Avid Cloud Collaboration for Pro Tools will radically change the way people produce music and open up unprecedented new creative possibilities.

Now, instead of wasting time manually managing the files required when using generic cloud storage, Avid Cloud Collaboration automatically synchronizes revisions and files in Pro Tools.

Pro Tools users can find and invite contacts to collaborate from within the application, or discover new collaborators through Avid's Artist Community. And then you can compose, record, edit and mix tracks collaboratively with other Pro Tools users, just as if you were working together in the same studio.

Finally, note that Avid and Adobe are working together to integrate Adobe Premiere into Interplay. Already in this NAB you can see a demonstration moving material from one application to another at amazing speed and in the same timeline. In addition, thanks to a simple plugin, users will be able to bring material from Premier to Media Central UX.

Access to the NAB 2016 SPECIAL in Panorama