Avid Announces New Platform Innovations for Media Organizations and Creative Professionals

Avid® (OTC: AVID) today introduced new and upcoming innovations for the Avid MediaCentral Platform—an open, extensible, and customizable common services foundation that delivers on the Avid Everywhere™ strategic vision for the media and entertainment industry. The company announced plans for resolution independence across the platform and the next phase of the Avid Connectivity Toolkit. These latest innovations are focused on helping media organizations and professionals connect with audiences more powerfully, efficiently, and profitably.

Avid Resolution Independence

Powered by the MediaCentral Platform’s underlying shared media services, connectivity, and orchestration capabilities, Avid Resolution Independence will give customers the freedom of choice and unmatched flexibility to work the way they want. Professionals will be able to work with 4K media and other high-res formats anywhere in the world, fluidly shifting between native and proxy media, leveraging the newly introduced Avid DNxHR codec. Whether on premises or in the cloud, the workflow will enable customers to ingest, store, orchestrate, edit, secure, analyze, and distribute SD, HD, 4K media and beyond within their existing infrastructure.

“Today’s media professionals face unrelenting pressure to handle high-res content with the same ease and agility as with HD and SD,” stated Chris Gahagan, senior vice president of Products and Technology. “Additionally, the constant evolution of technology coupled with the lack of standardization has resulted in tremendous fragmentation. Avid Resolution Independence will provide a holistic, platform-centric approach that puts no limits to the resolutions customers can capture, edit, and output—delivering on the Avid Everywhere promise of helping professionals work however they want.”

Avid Resolution Independence will allow customers to:

• Acquire: 

  • Save time by automating high-res media ingest and transcoding with Media Composer

  • Accelerate high-res ingest for the whole facility using Media | Director

• Edit:

  • Scale high-res files up and down using the new DNxHR codec, enabling easy proxy to mastering workflows

  • Edit high-res material natively with Media Composer and extend workflows to Media Composer | Cloud, MediaCentral | UX, and Interplay | Production

• Deliver:

  • Deliver HD and high-res masters directly from Media Composer, eliminating the need for third-party finishing tools

  • Deliver multiplatform versions of high-res content with Media | Distribute, minimizing the time from creation to consumption

Connectivity Toolkit enables Avid partners to easily get on the platform

The next phase of this comprehensive third-party developer program, first announced at NAB 2014, now gives partners access to the resources, documentation, certification, and services they need to create products and solutions that integrate with the Avid MediaCentral Platform ecosystem and sell them in the Avid Marketplace.

The next phase of the Connectivity Toolkit includes:

• A new pilot certification process, starting with AAX plugins, that will validate developer expertise and ensure that the products and solutions they create adhere to Connectivity Toolkit standards

• Access to development resources, including  an updated, expanded documentation library for Avid’s current SDKs and APIs

• A new developer portal that provides streamlined access to the tools vendors need to create the most highly integrated solutions and services possible

• A streamlined onboarding process for developers, making it faster and easier for them to make plugins and other products available via the Avid Marketplace

“One of the reasons media professionals choose Avid is because we give them the flexibility and ease to integrate third-party products into their workflow,” said Gahagan. “Since announcing the Connectivity Toolkit in April, we’ve been overwhelmed by the interest and demand, with hundreds of potential partners looking to get on the platform and help us solve many of the workflow challenges professionals face today.”

Several leading technology companies from across the industry are already using the Connectivity Toolkit to seamlessly integrate their products and services into the MediaCentral Platform. Among these Connectivity Partners are:

• Telestream—Integrating video transcoding solutions that streamline the multiplatform distribution process through Media | Distribute

• arvato Systems/S4M—Developing a solution to allow customers to locate and access local and remote S4M media more easily in an Avid environment using MediaCentral | UX

• make.tv—Developing a solution to help customers search for, access, and preview live produced and archived content within the make.tv cloud easily and quickly in an Avid work environment using MediaCentral | UX

• ChyronHego—Integrating its comprehensive suite of graphics solutions directly into Avid’s newsroom workflows

• Apogee—Integrating their portable digital audio interfaces with industry-leading Avid Pro Tools | Software, enabling customers to compose, record, edit, and mix professional-level productions, quickly and easily

• Additionally, a number of development partners have used the new Connectivity Toolkit to make over 20 new Pro Tools plugins available for sale on the Avid Marketplace