By Daniel Restuccio

During its Avid Connect conference just prior to NAB, Avid announced a Media Composer upgrade, support for ACES color standard and additional upgrades to a number of its toolsets, apps and services, including Avid Nexis.

The chief news from Avid is that Media Composer, its flagship video editing system, has been significantly retooled: sporting a new user interface, rebuilt engine, and additional built-in audio, visual effects, color grading and delivery features.

In a pre-interview with postPerspective, Avid president/CEO Jeff Rosica said, “We’re really trying to leap frog and jump ahead to where the creative tools need to go.”

Avid asked themselves, what did they need to do “to help production and post production really innovate?” He pointed to TV shows and films, and how complex they’re getting. “That means they’re dealing with more media, more elements, and with so many more decisions just in the program itself. Let alone the fact that the (TV or film) project may have to have 20 different variants just to go out the door.”

Jeff Rosica

The new paneled user interface simplifies the workspace, has redesigned bins to find media faster, as well as task-based workspaces showing only what the user wants and needs to see.

Dave Colantuoni, VP of product management at Avid, said they spent the most amount of time studying the way that editors manage and organize bins and content within Media Composer. “Some of our editors use 20, 30, 40 bins at a time. We’ve really spent a lot of time so that we can provide an advantage to you in how you approach organizing your media. “

Avid is also offering more efficient workflow solutions. Users, without leaving Media Composer, can work in 8K, 16K or HDR thanks to the newly built-in 32-bit full float color pipeline. Additionally, Avid continues to work with OTT content providers to help establish future industry standards.

“We’re trying to give as much creative power to the creative people as we can, and bring them new ways to deal with things,” said Rosica. “We’re also trying to help the workflow side. We’re trying to help make sure production doesn’t have to do more with less, or sometimes more with the same budget. Cloud (computing) allows us to bring a lot of new capabilities to the products, and we’re going to be cloud powering a lot of our products… more than you’ve seen before.”

The new Media Composer engine is now native OP1A, can handle more video and audio streams, offers Live Timeline and background rendering, and a distributed processing add-on option to shorten turnaround times and speed up post production.

“This is something our competitors do pretty well,” explained Colantuoni. “And we have different instances of OP1A working among the different Avid workflows. Until now, we’ve never had it working natively inside of Media Composer. That’s super-important because a lot of capabilities started in OP1A, and we can now keep it pristine through the pipeline.”

Said Rosica, “We are also bringing the ability to do distributive rendering. An editor no longer has to render or transcode on their machine. They can perform those tasks in a distributed or centralized render farm environment. That allows this work to get done behind the scenes. This is actually an Avid Supply solution, so it will be very powerful and reliable. Users will be able to do background rendering, as well as distributive rendering and move things off the machine to other centralized machines. That’s going to be very helpful for a lot of post workflows.”

Avid had previously offered three main flavors of Media Composer: Media Composer First, the free version; Media Composer; and Media Composer Ultimate. Now they are also offering a new Enterprise version.

For the first time, large production teams can customize the interface for any role in the organization, whether the user is a craft editor, assistant, logger or journalist. It also offers unparalleled security to lock down content, reducing the chances of unauthorized leaks of sensitive media. Enterprise also integrates with Editorial Management 2019.

“The new fourth tier at the top is what we are calling the Enterprise Edition or Enterprise. That word doesn’t necessarily mean broadcast,” says Rosica. “It means for business deployment. This is for post houses and production companies, broadcast, and even studios. This lets the business, or the enterprise, or production, or post house to literally customize interfaces and customize work spaces to the job role or to the user.”

Nexis Cloudspaces
Avid also announced Avid Nexis|Cloudspaces. So Instead of resorting to NAS or external drives for media storage, Avid Nexis|Cloudspaces allows editorial to offload projects and assets not currently in production. Cloudspaces extends Avid Nexis storage directly to Microsoft Azure.

“Avid Nexis|Cloudspaces brings the power of the cloud to Avid Nexis, giving organizations a cost-effective and more efficient way to extend Avid Nexis storage to the cloud for reliable backup and media parking,” said Dana Ruzicka, chief product officer/senior VP at Avid. “Working with Microsoft, we are offering all Avid Nexis users a limited-time free offer of 2TB of Microsoft Azure storage that is auto-provisioned for easy setup and as much capacity as you need, when you need it.”

ACES
The Academy Color Encoding System (ACES) team also announced that Avid is now part of the ACES Logo Program, as the first Product Partner in the new Editorial Finishing product category. ACES is a free, open, device-independent color management and image interchange system and is the global standard for color management, digital image interchange and archiving. Avid will be working to implement ACES in conformance with logo program specifications for consistency and quality with a high quality ACES-color managed video creation workflow.

“We’re pleased to welcome Avid to the ACES logo program,” said Andy Maltz, managing director of the ACES Council. “Avid’s participation not only benefits editors that need their editing systems to accurately manage color, but also the broader ACES end-user community through expanded adoption of ACES standards and best practices.”

What’s Next?
“We’ve already talked about how you can deploy Media Composer or other tools in a virtualized environment, or how you can use these kind of cloud environments to extend or advance production,” said Rosica. “We also see that these things are going to allow us to impact workloads. You’ll see us continue to power our MediaCentral platform, editorial management of MediaCentral, and even things like Media Composer with AI to help them get to the job faster. We can help automate functions, automate environments and use cloud technologies to allow people to collaborate better, to share better, to just power their workloads. You’re going to see a lot from us over time.”