Avid has unveiled a “redesigned and reimagined” version of its flagship video editing system, Media Composer, at its Avid Connect event at this year’s NAB show in Las Vegas.
“After receiving input from hundreds of editors and teams across the media industry, and knowing where the industry is headed, we reimagined Media Composer, the product that created the nonlinear video editing category and remains the gold standard,” said Jeff Rosica, CEO and President at Avid. “Media Composer 2019 is both evolutionary and revolutionary. It maintains what longtime users know and love while giving them more of what they need today—and what they will need tomorrow.”
Avid has revamped the UI with a panelled interface that reduces clutter, has reimagined bins to find media faster, and task-based workspaces showing “only what the user wants and needs to see.”
The toolset is now more customisable with the Enterprise version providing administrative control to customise the interface for the various roles in a production whether that’s a craft editor, assistant, logger or journalist.
Avid says Media Composer 2019 offers “unparalleled security to lock down content, reducing the chances of unauthorized leaks of sensitive media.”
The new Avid Media Engine has features such as native OP1A, support for more video and audio streams, Live Timeline and background rendering, and a distributed processing add-on option to shorten turnaround times and speed up post production.
Avid is also pushing Media Composer 2019’s all-in-one credentials with new finishing and delivery workflows letting users “create and deliver higher-quality content with editing, effects, colour, audio, and finishing tools without leaving Media Composer.”
It can also handle 8K, 16K, or HDR and Avid says it has been working with OTT content providers to help establish future industry standards.
Avid also announced Media Composer | Distributed Processing, an add-on option that shortens turnaround times and accelerates post production by sharing the media processing load. Tasks that previously took hours can now be done in minutes. Media Composer | Distributed Processing also offloads complex processing tasks when working in high resolution and HDR.
Media Composer 2019 will be available in late spring for all of its models: Media Composer | First, Media Composer, Media Composer | Ultimate and Media Composer | Enterprise.
In other news from Avid, the company also announced Avid NEXIS | Cloudspaces which brings the scale and flexibility of the cloud to the Avid Nexis storage system.
“Avid NEXIS | Cloudspaces brings the power of the cloud to Avid NEXIS, giving organisations a cost-effective and more efficient way to extend Avid NEXIS storage to the cloud for reliable backup and media parking,” said Dana Ruzicka, Chief Product Officer and Senior Vice President at Avid. “Working with Microsoft we are offering all Avid NEXIS users a limited-time free offer of 2 terabytes of Microsoft Azure storage that is auto-provisioned for easy setup and as much capacity as you need, when you need it.”
The new system makes it possible for users to easily offload projects and media not currently in production to the cloud. And, because Nexis manages cloudspaces alongside workspaces, users can spend less time searching for and wrangling media. Avid says that NEXIS | Cloudspaces eliminates the time wasted manually shuttling media to and wrangling media from USB drives.
Cloudspaces is available this month.
Staff Reporter
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