Next phase of Avid Everywhere ushered in at NAB
By Jim Bask
Avid® (NASDAQ: AVID) announced a series of breakthrough innovations for the Avid MediaCentral™ Platform and its associated modular application suites, delivering further on the key promises of Avid Everywhere™. These innovations solve the media industry’s most critical challenges, so that everyone–from individual artists and creative teams to the world’s largest media enterprises–can create, distribute, and manage content more efficiently and profitably using one single common platform.
“Three years ago, we unveiled Avid Everywhere, our sweeping, ambitious strategy to address the media industry’s most critical challenges,” said Avid chairman, president, and CEO Louis Hernandez, Jr. “Since then, we have delivered a series of groundbreaking innovations that help media organizations and creative professionals work together as part of a unified global community. Today, with an ever-expanding platform and powerful new solutions, we are making content creation and distribution more efficient, powerful, and collaborative for everyone.
With more than 32,000 users worldwide and a rapidly expanding partner ecosystem, the Avid MediaCentral Platform is an open, extensible, and customizable common services foundation. The platform provides a series of application suites, a marketplace, collaboration tools, flexible licensing and deployment options, resolution independence, third-party connectivity, and more, offering the industry’s most open, flexible, and comprehensive solutions for content creation, management, and distribution.
The new NAB platform announcements include:
Next-generation intelligent media storage: Avid NEXIS™ is the industry’s first and only software-defined storage platform, and enables fully virtualized storage so media organizations can adjust storage capacity mid-project, without disrupting workflows. Avid NEXIS delivers unrivaled media storage flexibility, scalability, and control for both Avid-based and third-party workflows. It has been designed to serve the smallest production teams as powerfully as the largest media enterprises and is the only storage platform built with the flexibility to grow with customers at every stage of their business.
State-of-the-art graphics authoring for broadcast news and more: The new 4Designer graphics authoring software offers a complete solution for creating captivating 2D and 3D motion graphics in a wide range of resolutions. This feature-rich toolset provides broadcasters with the tools they need to create stunning real-time visual content for news, elections, sports events, weather segments, business reports, and more. As the successor to the award-winning 3Designer, 4Designer offers more power, speed, and new features in a more modern interface, yet maintains the same workflows and compatibility with existing 3Designer templates.
Accelerated graphics production for sports: The new Avid Spark live sports enhancement telestration tool enables on-air commentators to draw and add graphics to a video in real time, giving audiences better visual insight into key plays, game flow, and analysis. Designed for fast operation, Avid Spark provides feature-rich capabilities to accelerate 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 both onscreen and in-field perspectives, ensuring a realistic viewing experience. Ideal for small to mid-size operations, Avid Spark helps broadcasters produce better game visuals, attract a wider audience, and deliver more compelling content that stands apart from the competition.
Extended Avid Resolution Independence: Avid 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 MediaCentral Platform support, production teams can now benefit from this modern, highly efficient compression scheme in the most efficient way using streamlined and highly integrated workflows.
Expanded Connectivity Partner Program with new third-party integrations: Avid announced new innovations that help customers reduce the burden of making disparate technology work together so they can focus on creating great content. The newly expanded Avid Connectivity Partner Program provides extensive 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 organizations immediately access solutions from a convenient centralized location.
Open and interoperable IP workflows for the MediaCentral Platform: Avidannounced its plan to accelerate the media industry’s transition to IP by supporting real time IP signals in the Avid MediaCentral Platform, delivering a unified platform environment for converged file-based and live signal-based media workflows. In technology presentations at the Avid booth (#SU902) at NAB 2016, Avid will demonstrate native IP-based workflows as well as hybrid SDI/IP workflows that enable media companies to leverage standard IT infrastructure, while managing the transition to IP at their own pace.