NAB 2019: Avid Unveils Revamped Media Composer, NEXIS | Cloudspaces SaaS Storage Offering
Avid (booth SU801) made a pair of major announcements at its annual Avid Connect 2019 gathering on Saturday, unveiling dramatically redesigned version of its flagship Media Composer flagship video editing system and the new Avid NEXIS | Cloudspaces SaaS storage offering.
Revamped Media Composer Features New UI, Avid Media Engine, and More
The new Media Composer 2019 has been redesigned and reimagined with a new user experience; a next-generation Avid Media Engine with distributed processing, finishing and delivering capabilities; 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. Avid said Media Composer 2019 will be available at the end of May.
Avid CEO Jeff Rosica opened up Avid Connect 2019 by stating “we are now only unveiling [products] on this stage that are near the end of development.”
“After receiving input from hundreds of editors and teams across the media industry, and knowing where the industry is headed, we reimagined Media Composer, the product that created the nonlinear video editing category and remains the gold standard,” said Jeff Rosica, CEO and President at Avid. “Media Composer 2019 is both evolutionary and revolutionary. It maintains what longtime users know and love while giving them more of what they need today—and what they will need tomorrow.”
The new user experience features a paneled interface that reduces clutter, reimagined bins to find media faster, and task-based workspaces showing only what the user wants and needs to see.
The next-generation Avid Media Engine enables new features, such as native OP1A, support for more video and audio streams, Live Timeline and background rendering, and a distributed processing add-on option to shorten turnaround times and speed up post production.
Avid (SU801) unveiled a major redesign of its flagship Media Composer video-editing system at Avid Connect 2019
Users can create and deliver higher-quality content with editing, effects, color, audio, and finishing tools without leaving Media Composer. Media Composer’s new built-in 32-bit full float color pipeline can handle 8K, 16K, or HDR. Additionally, Avid has been working with OTT content providers to help establish future industry standards.
Built for large production teams, the new Media Composer | Enterprise provides administrative control to customize the interface for any role in the organization, whether the user is a craft editor, assistant, logger or journalist. It also offers security to lock down content, reducing the chances of unauthorized leaks of sensitive media.
Avid says Media Composer | Enterprise is the industry’s first role-specific video editing and finishing solution. Large production teams now have the ability to customize the interface and tailor workspaces for different job roles, providing end users access only to the tools and functions they need. This capability gives teams better focus so they can complete jobs faster and with fewer mistakes. Media Composer | Enterprise also integrates with Editorial Management 2019 to deliver collaborative workflow innovation for post production and enables creative teams to stay in sync.
Avid today also announced Media Composer | Distributed Processing, an add-on option that shortens turnaround times and accelerates post production by sharing the media processing load – meaning asks that previously took hours can now be done in minutes. Media Composer | Distributed Processing also offloads complex processing tasks when working in today’s emerging high resolution and HDR media-rich worlds.
Media Composer 2019 will be available in late spring for all of its models: Media Composer | First, Media Composer, Media Composer | Ultimate and Media Composer | Enterprise.
New Avid NEXIS | Cloudspaces Offers Instant Storage Expansion in the Cloud
Avid also announced Avid NEXIS | Cloudspaces, which brings the flexibility and scale of the cloud to Avid NEXIS storage systems. Avid NEXIS | Cloudspaces gives users instant access to more storage when needed. Avid NEXIS | Cloudspaces extends Avid NEXIS storage directly to Microsoft Azure and is available now.
Avid NEXIS | Cloudspaces brings the flexibility and scale of the cloud to Avid NEXIS storage systems
“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 and Senior Vice President at Avid. “Working with Microsoft we are offering all Avid NEXIS users a limited-time free offer of 2 terabytes of Microsoft Azure storage that is auto-provisioned for easy setup and as much capacity as you need, when you need it.”
With Avid NEXIS | Cloudspaces, users can start storing media in the cloud today and benefit from Avid NEXIS’s robust workspace management and user access controls with the flexibility and scale of the cloud.
Users safely can sync or park on-premise Avid NEXIS workspaces to Avid NEXIS | Cloudspaces with commonly used media management tools, while optimized media workflows provide organizations with better efficiency and security over risky manual processes.
Instead of resorting to NAS or external drives when budgets are tight, Avid NEXIS | Cloudspaces makes it easy to offload projects and media not currently in production – freeing up local Avid NEXIS storage. And, because Avid NEXIS manages cloudspaces alongside workspaces, users can spend less time searching for and wrangling media—giving them more time to create.
In terms of setup, Avid NEXIS | Cloudspaces offers easy activation and auto-provisioning from the Avid NEXIS Management Console, with activation from an Avid Link account, leveraging Avid NEXIS workspace user access controls for end-to-end security.
Avid NEXIS | Cloudspaces eliminates the time wasted manually shuttling media to and wrangling media from USB drives, so users can keep production moving and easily park projects and media. With a variety of subscription plans available, users can match their storage expense to their business needs.
Avid NEXIS | Cloudspaces extends Avid NEXIS storage directly to Microsoft Azure. Now Avid customers can easily benefit from Azure’s hyper-scale storage capacity, global distribution and industry leading storage and networking capabilities.
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