Avid Unveils Next-Generation News Production Workflows with MediaCentral

Avid® (Nasdaq: AVID), a leading global media technology provider for the creation, distribution, and monetization of media asset for global media organizations, enterprise users, and individual creative professionals, today introduced MediaCentral solutions for news. Integrating the Avid FastServe™ family of video servers, the next-generation MediaCentral® production suite, and Maestro | News—the scalable, end-to-end MediaCentral® solutions enabling news organizations to create content from any location—deliver breaking news first on every consumer platform, and accelerate every aspect of their media production workflow. 

“Today’s news organizations are under relentless pressure to deliver information faster and to more distribution channels than ever before, all while growing viewership and differentiating their brand,” said Dana Ruzicka, Vice President and Chief Product Officer, Avid. “Avid MediaCentral for news is built for the rigors of modern news operations, seamlessly integrating web, mobile, and TV delivery with rich immersive graphics. We’re excited to take it to the next level with our new FastServe video server family, MediaCentral | Newsroom Management and Production Management modules, and the expanded Maestro | News graphics suite. All of this is tightly integrated on the open and extensible MediaCentral platform, enabling news teams to turn stories around faster, to more channels, with greater efficiency.”

Uniting Avid’s industry-leading product line in a seamless single platform, MediaCentral solutions for news include:

• MediaCentral | Cloud UX: The completely redesigned MediaCentral | Cloud UX (user experience) is an easy-to-use and task-oriented graphical user interface that runs on virtually any operating system or mobile device, and is available to everyone connected to the platform, no matter where they are. Team members can easily collaborate with each other from wherever they are—in the same building, across town, or even on a different continent.
• MediaCentral | Newsroom Management: Part of the next-generation MediaCentral production suite, MediaCentral | Newsroom Management is a fully customizable workflow module for complete story creation and rundown management for news teams, providing improved workflow efficiency and speed to break news across multiple broadcast and digital outlets. It integrates seamlessly with other MediaCentral workflow modules, apps, services, and platform-enabled solutions.
• MediaCentral | Production Management: Part of the next-generation MediaCentral production suite, MediaCentral | Production Management provides advanced file and workflow management for mid-sized to large production teams, simplifying and accelerating media production workflow. This fully customizable MediaCentral workflow module enables news production teams to manage the content creation process, automate workflows, and collaborate—all from a simple web interface—so projects move easily in parallel and work gets done faster.
• MediaCentral | Graphics Management: Part of the next-generation MediaCentral production suite, MediaCentral | Graphics Management is a powerful and easy-to-use graphics asset management solution that delivers seamless workflow integration across your news production environment, providing teams with greater access, efficiency, and collaboration, and significantly accelerating and simplifying the content creation process.
• MediaCentral | Maestro News: The new MediaCentral | Maestro News app within MediaCentral | Cloud UX offers access to a full graphics production workflow from anywhere. Journalists can drag and drop clips and images directly from MediaCentral into Maestro | News graphics templates to accelerate real-time broadcast graphics production.
• Avid NEXIS: The new Avid NEXIS Enterprise systems increase capacity to 4.8 PB of raw storage, leveraging new 100 TB Media Packs.  Avid NEXIS | PRO now scales to 160 TB>—twice its previous capacity—giving smaller operations the ease-of-use, security, and performance advantages enjoyed by larger Avid NEXIS customers.  Additionally, Avid NEXIS | E2 now supports SSD drives to deliver the extreme performance required when working with multiple streams of high-resolution media in real-time.

Building on the rich heritage of the industry-leading AirSpeed® and PlayMaker™ video servers, Avid’s new generation Avid FastServe family of video servers are tightly integrated with MediaCentral solutions for news. They feature a unified modular architecture that supports UHD and IP I/O to enable ultra-fast ingest and playout. The FastServe video servers for news include:

• FastServe | Ingest allows broadcast news teams to capture HD and UHD content in pristine Avid DNxHR format directly to Avid NEXIS® storage via a 10GbE connection. This allows quick access to assets across the organization through MediaCentral and to Media Composer®, enabling editing during ingest, while decreasing the time to air for news content delivery.
• FastServe | Live Edit provides news broadcasters with a turnkey solution for ultra-fast turnaround of incoming feeds. FastServe | Live Edit incorporates ingest, editing, and playout within the same 3U chassis, making it the most robust fast-turnaround tool for live environments.
• FastServe | Playout is a file-based playback server for video clips, images, and motion graphics controlled from a single user interface. Tightly integrated with MediaCentral, FastServe | Playout accommodates a range of production requirements such as searching and dragging and dropping indexed content from MediaCentral. FastServe | Playout is also deeply integrated into MediaCentral-based news workflows for lightning-fast turnaround, and allows playback of media directly from Avid NEXIS without copying the content to local storage first.

To learn more about MediaCentral for News, please visit http://www.avid.com/solutions/news-production.