From my NAB BuZZ special report:
Two words I never thought I’d associate with Avid are Interoperability and Openness, and yet this has been the theme of Avid’s 2010 announcements.
Since the recent rebranding of the five Avid-owned companies as one Avid, the company is using the tag line We’re Avid, are you, and constantly pushed the idea that Avid was open and stood for interoperability.
Heading off their event announcements was the concept of an Integrated Media Enterprise with an open media catalog for metadata management. Metadata management means that media can be found when it’s needed using search functions. New is the ability to view metadata in a Media Composer timeline.
Integrated Media Enterprise is at the core of Avid’s “any media, any platform” editing solution across diverse locations. Also important is a new revision to Interplay: Interplay 2, which comes in two forms. Interplay Media Asset Management is based on Avid’s recent purchase of Blue Order. Featuring an open, modular achitecture and support for a unified media management.
The Original Interplay is now known as Interplay Production to pair with the Interplay Media Asset Manager.
In the editorial field, Media Composer 5 has been announced for a mid July ship date. This new version expands the Avid Media Architecture to support RED, Canon XF and QT media natively with instant access and no transcoding required. My personal favorite new feature for Media Composer is the end of Segment mode: I can drag and drop clips in a sequence just like I’d expect. Also new is support for AVC-50 and 100 throughout the entire Avid product line and real time audio filters in the timeline. [Updated] Although it was stated at the press conference these audio filters carry through to a ProTools session and all changes made in ProTools to filter settings are all carried back to Media Composer, this is Avid’s intention but until ProTools gets an update to support it, the workflow is not complete.
Rounding out the day’s announcements was the purchase of Euphonix by Avid to enhance their range of control surfaces so they can support more market needs.
Check out the Avid announcements at Avid.com