Cloud video editing on demand powers post production

Collaboration and over-the-shoulder post-production workflows are now much more accessible and flexible thanks to the cloud, and can even simulate an in-person, on-premises experience. These capabilities—and more—are available through Avid | Edit On Demand, a post-production SaaS solution that can be easily added to existing on-premise infrastructure. Workflow agility, fast set-up, and ease of use are hallmarks of the Avid | Edit On Demand virtual environment.

The power and simplicity of Avid | Edit On Demand were recently demonstrated during the Avid webinar “Video Review and Approval Without Boundaries.” Avid’s Danny Hollingsworth, Business Development Manager, Cloud and SaaS, and Craig Wilson, Product Evangelist, Media and Cloud, presented the new over-the-shoulder workflow capabilities of Avid | Edit On Demand, which allow producers and other collaborators, no matter where they’re located, to securely view an editor’s output in real time.

“It's all running in a cloud environment, so it allows you to share and to store media securely, and it allows people to collaborate remotely with distributed teams,” Wilson said of Avid | Edit On Demand. “You could be located anywhere.”

The ability to share edits to multiple locations can be a huge benefit for remote post-production workflows. Avid | Edit On Demand employs the Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) protocol to enable this capability. Multiple outputs can be distributed simultaneously to any SRT-enabled decoder, set-top box, video player, or mobile device, thereby eliminating the need for collaborators to physically be in the same room.

“I can share content on a point-to-point basis to one specific person, or to a range of different devices,” Wilson explains. “So perhaps I've got the producers in one place, the director is somewhere else, and other members of the team are in other locations. They can now all look at the same content at the same time, and then obviously to comment on what's being done.”

Avid | Edit On Demand is currently available in most parts of the world, including major centers of media production in the United States, United Kingdom, West Europe, India, Japan, and Australia. Avid is exploring new regions to expand the system’s reach even further.

“You might be in West Europe, for example, and ask, ‘Can I use that in the southern parts of Europe?’” Hollingsworth says. “Absolutely. You don't have to have it in exactly the closest data center, just close enough to provide good latency.”

One of the biggest advantages of Avid | Edit On Demand is that it can be provisioned and set up in a matter of minutes. Users don’t have to be a cloud specialist or hire an engineer to deploy the system.

“You can deploy it in just a few clicks. It’s very light touch,” says Hollingsworth. “If you’re used to shared storage projects and bins working in Avid Media Composer, you’ll be very familiar with what Edit On Demand offers.” A range of productions can be supported with Avid | Edit On Demand, including scripted and non-scripted television post production, feature film editing, and sports broadcasts in which the event is being recorded in one location and editorial is happening elsewhere. The SaaS is also ideal for editing content targeted for social platforms.

“It supports a real mix of different workflows, and so we don't see it fit in just one box,” says Hollingsworth. "If you've got a workflow you think might be a good fit for EOD, we'd love to hear about it.”

For productions that need to deploy Media Composer workstations on short notice, or only require temporary remote editing capabilities, Avid | Edit On Demand is a great way to go. System performance and quality-of-service are managed by Avid in the cloud, so teams don’t even have to worry about bringing people onto their network.