IBC 2019: Avid debuts reimagined production and post workflow solutions for video/audio content

At IBC2019, Avid (stand 7.B55) turns the spotlight on to its latest software and solutions innovations for Europe’s media enterprises, teams and individuals to enable them to better create, collaborate and meet the challenges of today’s media creation and distribution. Visitors to Avid’s stand will experience the completely reimagined Media Composer, the next generation of MediaCentral, the all-new Avid S4 and Avid S1 audio control surfaces, the Avid NEXIS | Cloudspaces SaaS storage offering, the latest FastServe video servers, and more.

“Today’s content creators must contend with new formats, higher resolutions, ever-tightening budgets and broader distribution realities, so media creation and distribution tools must work harder than ever,” said Jeff Rosica, CEO and President at Avid. “We’re continually evolving our solutions to exceed customer expectations, engineering for greater efficiencies, delivering across more platforms, and providing more control of the creative process. At IBC, we look forward to demonstrating how, with Avid, our customers can deliver more content and create at the speed of inspiration.”

Media Composer 2019
IBC marks the European debut of Media Composer 2019, Avid’s flagship video editing system reimagined for today’s — and tomorrow’s — generation of media makers. Aspiring and professional editors, freelancers and journalists can work more creatively through a new user experience, next-generation Avid media engine with distributed processing, finishing and delivering capabilities and support for 8K, 16K, and HDR, and a customizable role-based user interface for large teams. With Media Composer 2019, an editor can go from first cut to delivery without ever leaving the application.

At IBC, Avid will preview a host of forthcoming Media Composer features and updates, including:

• New controls for Media Composer | Enterprise administrators to configure Media Composer’s UI and secure media with lock down capabilities based on a user’s role
• Bulk Edit, which will allow users to speed up applying text in a bin column to multiple clips at a time
• An improved interoperability workflow for exchanging sequences between Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro

In addition, Media Composer will deliver native support for Apple’s ProRes RAW camera codec and support for ProRes playback and encoding on Windows. In addition, Apple will provide 64-bit decoders for DNxHR and DNxHD codecs within the Pro Video Formats package that is available from Apple as a free download for all users. These integrations will allow content creators and post-production companies to natively create high-quality ProRes content regardless of their OS and save time during the creative storytelling process.

ProRes is a high-performance editing codec that provides multistream, high-quality images and low complexity for premium real-time editing. The codec, which will be available to Media Composer users on Windows, supports frame sizes ranging from SD and HD to 2K, 4K, and beyond at full resolution with stunning image-quality preservation and reduced storage rates.

Media Composer for macOS and Windows, which was completely redesigned for 2019, also will add native support for ProRes RAW. ProRes RAW applies ProRes compression to the raw data from a camera sensor to provide the flexibility of RAW video with the performance of ProRes for editing today’s highest-resolution outputs.

Finally, the continued availability of Avid’s DNxHD and DNxHR decoders for macOS is a tremendous benefit to content creators using Apple and Avid products and will ensure the longevity of content creators’ DNx material encoded in MXF and QuickTime files.

“This collaboration democratizes content creation by removing the boundaries posed by different operating systems and opens the door to a greater number of higher-quality delivery formats,” said Rob D’Amico, Director of Product Marketing, at Avid. “Adding support for ProRes for Windows, native ProRes RAW and DNx Codecs is yet another way Media Composer deals with advancements in technology so editors can stay focused on creative storytelling.”

MediaCentral | Editorial Management
Avid will showcase MediaCentral | Editorial Management, which boasts an enriched media management toolset that includes browser-based editing, storyboarding, phonetic media search, and project management capabilities. Through a powerful yet simple workflow, completely integrated with Media Composer and Avid NEXIS storage, content creators can accelerate the entire post-production workflow, quickly browsing, searching, logging, and organizing multicamera footage from anywhere.

MediaCentral
MediaCentral takes a leap forward with MediaCentral 2019, the industry’s most comprehensive, next-generation media workflow platform for TV news, sports and enterprise media management operations. MediaCentral has been redesigned to enable customers—from teams of two to an organization of thousands—to have easy access to information, media assets and apps, so they can turn around their content faster than before. At IBC2019, Avid will unveil MediaCentral l Publisher, a new SaaS offering powered by Wildmoka, that allows media producers to create content, add graphics and branding, and publish news and sports videos quickly to multiple social media and digital end points to boost viewership and drive revenue.

FastServe
Avid unveils enhancements to its FastServe video server platform at IBC for fast-turnaround and highly efficient end-to-end news, sports, and live production workflows. Available in three smaller-footprint configurations, FastServe | Ingest, Live Edit, and Playout are tightly integrated with Avid NEXIS and MediaCentral, and accelerate ingest, editing, and playout workflows while supporting higher channel counts and a lower overall cost per channel.

Avid NEXIS | Cloudspaces
IBC marks the European debut of Avid NEXIS | Cloudspaces, which takes the stress out of media management by seamlessly extending Avid NEXIS storage to the cloud for easily parking projects and backing up Avid NEXIS workspaces. Using the same Avid NEXIS Management Console, users can easily activate Avid NEXIS l Cloudspaces, which auto-provisions cloud storage leveraging the power of Microsoft Azure, freeing up local space for uninterrupted production, and offering news, sports, and post-production teams an easy way to safely store and park media in the cloud.

Pro Tools 2019
Also making its European debut at IBC is Pro Tools 2019, which boosts power and performance for every user—from professional music creators and aspiring artists to top-echelon audio post professionals and engineers—enabling them to work faster and more creatively on the most complex projects. For users working in high track-count environments, such as audio postproduction, Pro Tools | Ultimate delivers 50 percent more voices/audio tracks than previous versions. In addition to this base voice limit increase to 384, Pro Tools | Ultimate software and HD Native customers can further increase the number of available voices up to 768 per system—on par with a three-card Pro Tools | HDX system—with the addition of Pro Tools | Ultimate Voice Packs.

At IBC, Avid will preview forthcoming new features for post-production professionals, including new support for higher video resolutions and frame rates. The ability to repurpose the same content in Media Composer will eliminate the need for transcoding and file format or resolution conversion, dramatically streamlining end-to-end audio post-production workflows and saving time and costly storage.

Avid S4 and Avid S1
The newly released Avid S4 brings the power and workflows of Avid’s industry-leading Pro Tools | S6 control surface to budget-conscious audio professionals and small- to mid-size music and audio post facilities in an ergonomic, more compact package. The S4 provides an integrated experience with any EUCON-enabled DAW, from Pro Tools, Nuendo and Pyramix to Logic Pro, Cubase, and other audio software. At IBC, Avid will show a side-by-side comparison of the Avid S4 and Avid S6 mixing for Dolby Atmos.

The soon-to-be-delivered Avid S1 gives audio professionals the hands-on speed, precision, and software integration needed to deliver better-sounding mixes faster. From recording and editing tracks, to mixing and monitoring in stereo or surround, S1 provides the comprehensive control and visual feedback to accelerate any audio workflow.