AI for News Workflows Demoed by Avid at IBC2024
Avid Ada is the framework which underpins AI and ML solutions across the full range of Avid products. Within Avid MediaCentral, the first applications of this technology were demonstrated at the IBC2024 show in Amsterdam. Along with AI advances, Avid also showcased a range of other creativity enhancing and efficiency driving developments in MediaCentral as well. These included:
- A powerful new Rules Engine to deliver automation workflows
- A refreshed iNEWS client and additional newsroom timing options in the MediaCentral | Cloud UX Rundown app
- New editing capabilities
- Enterprise grade messaging with Microsoft Teams
Having been highlighted as a tech preview at the show last year, attendees this year were able to view the ability to generate interview transcripts, manually or automatically, within the web-based MediaCentral | Cloud UX.
The transcripts, which are generated faster than real-time, are also available within the MediaCentral | Panel for Media Composer and the MediaCentral | Panel for 3rd Party Creative Tools within Adobe Premiere Pro. Transcripts are fully searchable, making it easier for editorial team members to find what they need quicker than ever.
Users can choose which audio tracks they would like to use to generate the transcript, supporting workflows where multiple audio channels are used to record interviews.
“This is only the start of the implementation of AI services with MediaCentral, and the reception we have received from customers has been overwhelmingly positive,” says Régis André, Avid Senior Director of Product Management. “These developments, along with other new capabilities we displayed, are enabling our customers to work more efficiently to deliver high quality stories and shows every day.”
Régis André, Avid Senior Director of Product Management
The delivery of AI services is under the auspices of Avid’s Responsible AI approach, recently outlined by Avid Chief Technical Officer (CTO) Kevin Riley.
The technology behind the transcription runs within a customer’s MediaCentral environment whether on bare metal servers or in a virtualized environment. While there are no cloud services involved or connections required,
AI services can run in the cloud if a customer’s MediaCentral set-up is hosted there. AI for news workflows demoed by Avid at IBC2024 were among the innovations showcased as we unveiled a raft of new capabilities within the MediaCentral product portfolio.
This included an updated and refreshed look for the iNEWS client, the powerhouse of newsroom workflows across the world.
Newsroom functionality within the MediaCentral | Cloud UX Rundown app has been further updated with new timing controls, plus the ability to display character count in stories as well as duration, essential for social media platforms where character counts can be limited.
In addition, within MediaCentral | Cloud UX, a new rules engine was demonstrated, enabling more efficient workflows within MediaCentral | Production Management and MediaCentral | Asset Management by creating the ability to trigger and automate tasks such as folder creation, media manipulation, or send to playback processes.
Ingest workflows are also covered within MediaCentral | Cloud UX, and the Acquire app showcased several usability enhancements, including the direct manipulation of recordings within the scheduled timeline to adjust the start time, duration, and end time of any item, more customizable metadata entry and strengthened user access permissions. The Acquire app was shown controlling Avid | Stream IO for ingest, which has also been updated to support IP-based ingest.
Enterprise scale messaging was shown as a Beta preview, with a new panel, which can be detached, hosting Microsoft Teams chat directly with MediaCentral | Cloud UX. There were also updates to the editing capabilities within MediaCentral | Cloud UX with the addition of audio waveform scaling and dip to color effects.
“It is worth noting, along with all of these user features, that security is an ongoing priority for all of us at Avid,” André adds. “Our teams are constantly working to deliver the highest security standards we can, as we recognize that this is a major issue for our customers. The addition of support for identity providers such as Okta and Keycloak to both MediaCentral | Newsroom Management and MediaCentral | Asset Management is evidence of this work.”
All of these developments will be available in MediaCentral 2024.10 release, coming soon.
Craig Wilson
Craig Wilson is a newsroom specialist with more than thirty years of experience in the broadcast industry. Craig has held various roles with Avid and is now the Global Media and Cloud Product Evangelist and host of the Making the Media podcast.