Avid Everywhere Powers Top Artists’ Live Performances at Prestigious Gent Jazz Festival

Avid® (OTC: AVID) today announced that the prestigious 2014 Gent Jazz Festival brought the Avid Everywhere™ vision to life by empowering performers with a collaborative live sound workflow based on the Avid MediaCentral Platform. Acclaimed jazz artists including Michael Kiwanuka, Melanie De Biasio, and Gabriel Rios, used Avid S3L live sound systems to deliver pristine-sounding live performances at the festival, which took place in Belgium. Through the powerful Avid MediaCentral Platform, opportunities for future monetization of performance content were also presented to the festival’s artists and producers.

Key to the decision to select Avid as the exclusive partner of the festival’s Garden Stage live sound workflow was the need to be able to capture and mix live performances as quickly and as cost-effectively as possible. Given the wide variety of acts appearing on the Garden Stage and its relatively small footprint, the festival’s organizers also required a powerful, proven and compact live sound set-up.

Ives Mergaerts, Artist Production Manager at Gent Jazz Festival said: “Crucial for us was to achieve exceptional sound with as compact a footprint as possible. By choosing an Avid live sound workflow, we had the confidence and peace of mind of knowing that we were in safe hands. Importantly as it’s the industry’s live audio production technology of choice, we knew that it is well known and trusted by our front of house engineers.”

The festival is using the ultra-portable Avid S3L System, part of the Avid Artist Suite, powered by the Avid MediaCentral Platform. Using the S3L for both FOH and monitoring enabled the floor space in front of the stage to be maximized and all aspects of the live mixing and recording were speeded up through the integration with VENUE software. This empowered the engineers to run an expanded creative toolset of Avid and third-party plugins using the board’s Pro Tools HDX-powered processing engine. An additional S3L System was used to record the output from all stages through the industry-standard audio production platform, Avid Pro Tools®, presenting monetization opportunities for the artists beyond the festival.

“The lifespan of a live performance carries on long after the curtain has closed and the audience has left the venue,” said Tim Carroll, vice president of Worldwide Audio Programs at Avid. “Artists of the caliber that play at the Gent Jazz Festival need to make their performances available for future use in order to connect more powerfully with audiences even after the show is over – so the ability to replay, resell, and reproduce content through a variety of channels is critical. The Avid Everywhere vision guides the integrated and versatile nature of our live sound workflows, enabling future monetization and delivering massive benefits for both festival organizers and artists.”