Avid MediaCentral is updated with new media planning and management features

MediaCentral, the Avide platform designed to accelerate production in both physical and cloud-based environments, receives a number of new enhancements aimed at streamlining the day-to-day operations of production teams and enhancing team collaboration.

Blueprint Builder in Avid’s MediaCentral newsroom planning, content distribution and project tracking tool. Newsroom teams can now customize their planning and approval workflows with the specific attributes they need for their productions, enabling them to share and track content more quickly. In addition, MediaCentral receives the new Collections application, which is designed to work like a clipboard to make it easier for users to collect material.

The Avid solution also receives improved send-to-playback capabilities with this update. Now, an incoming feed, even if not yet complete, can be transferred to FastServe / Playout servers, replacing the need for teams to edit a feed on a timeline before transferring it. The MediaCentral development team has also worked on enhancements to the Rundown application, which allow for expanded versatility in the MediaCentral Cloud UX web application, so journalists can work with both video and text without needing to switch applications.

The tool enhancements are complemented by an increase in the granularity of user rights management in Acquire, allowing production teams controlling multiple ingest and playout devices to grant users specific permissions to record or view content. In addition, they will be able to add custom metadata (including mandatory metadata) at the ingest stage, which helps improve clip visibility, reduce search time, and speed up the playout of stories live or online.

Dave Colantuoni, vice president of video product management and media solutions at Avide, remarks that these “ongoing updates” updates to MediaCentral “are designed to help production teams unlock creativity and operational efficiency, enabling our media enterprise customers to provide better content for their viewers quicker than ever.” “Teams can work more closely together to plan, track and share content to deliver to multiple platforms – with the confidence their valuable media and metadata remains safe through enhanced security,” concludes Colantuoni.