NAB Perspectives: Avid Embraces COTS, Fully Integrates Orad and Avid Products

The past year at Avid has been a busy one with respect to sports production. The company has been working on integrating its existing products with those from Orad Hi-Tec Systems.

“We’ve spent our time building a lot of connectors between the Orad products and Avid’s MediaCentral, and we have created what we believe is the most elaborate sports production out there,” says Ofir Benovici, senior director, broadcast products, Avid Technology. “If you look at the breadth of the solutions we offer, the replay servers, graphics, sports enhancements, asset management, editing, and audio, it’s massive. And what we showed at NAB was the first results of the integration.”

Avid Nexis exemplifies a new philosophy that embraces commercial off-the-shelf storage.

Avid also is stepping up its efforts to make use of commodity off-the-shelf computing and server technologies. Nexis, for example, is a re-engineered file system for Avid storage.

“Historically, we have made hardware and software that is tightly integrated, and, as a consequence, products were quite costly,” explains Kevin Usher, director, broadcast and media product marketing, Avid. “Nexis is a software-defined layer that uses off-the-shelf storage, and the benefit is, we can focus on the file system rather than hardware. It opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities.”

With one single solution, for example, the Avid PlayMaker can be playing out a replay while ingesting into the Avid Nexis storage system in real time.

“And all of the content is being exposed to all of the Nexis users via proxy versions via MediaCentral,” adds Benovici. “The sports logger can be logging the event as it progresses, and, based on that, highlight packages can be created. And then, on the graphics side, they also can be run from MediaCentral, and that is very exciting.”

Looking toward next-generation needs, Avid also demonstrated 4K graphics and 4K video replays.

There is also the next-generation need for more-affordable productions and the introduction of a new version of the Spark telestration system.

Notes Benovici, “We have a lighter version that is simple to use and has pricing that is more attractive for the second-tier sports market.”

Subscribe and Get SVG Europe Newsletters