Showcased at NAB 2017, the innovations from Avid represent a major step for the company, and are the result of four years of intensive effort to transform Avid Everywhere from vision to reality.

The next phase of evolution for Avid is filled, claims the company, with groundbreaking innovations. The 2017 edition of NAB Show served as the stage to announce the news. Avid unveils major advancements across all product suites and extends MediaCentral Platform into the cloud, showcases end-to-end 4K/IP workflows, enhances immersive workflows and expands Alliance partner ecosystem—delivering innovations for students and aspiring artists, educational institutions, creative professionals and media enterprises.

“After four years of intensive effort and unyielding dedication, we’ve completed the transformation of Avid Everywhere from vision to reality,” said Avid Chairman and CEO Louis Hernandez, Jr. “Now we’re turning our attention to accelerating the pace of innovation—a key part of which involves extending media production to the cloud—to address the most critical challenges facing our customers.”

The announcements made at NAB Show 2017 include:

• Extending MediaCentral to the cloud – With new cloud-based applications, media services and infrastructure on demand, media organizations can capitalize on the efficiency, agility, flexibility and scalability that the cloud facilitates. To enable continued cloud innovation, Avid announced Microsoft as its preferred public cloud partner. Comprehensive multi-year agreement includes technology collaboration, co-development and go-to-market cooperation that will set the pace for the industry in bringing media enterprises, creative teams and individual artists into the cloud.  Companies will work closely together on cloud-based solutions and cloud services based on Avid’s market-leading creative tools and media workflow solutions, and Microsoft Azure cloud platform and media services.
• New services on the MediaCentral Platform – Avid Dialogue Search provides a scalable search platform enabling users to locate clips based on spoken words or phrases across archives, media asset management systems and production asset management systems, while Avid Illuminate™ provides a file-based quality assurance system for verifying captions, video descriptions and languages.
• Avid brings native Dolby Atmos mixing to Pro Tools | HD and S6 – With deep integration of Dolby Atmos in Pro Tools, audio post professionals can now create massive multichannel mixes more easily in the industry’s leading immersive audio format for movies, TV shows, music, and video games.
• Avid Artist | DNxIQ accelerates video workflows – With this powerful new video interface’s extensive format support, from SD to 4k and Universal Mastering, video professionals can quickly and easily respond to changing content demands and deliver to a wider range of channels and devices.
• Free version of industry standard Media Composer for aspiring artists – Avid Media Composer | First gives aspiring creative professionals, students, and those just starting their professional careers free access to the same creative tools used by the world’s most successful filmmakers and television program creators.
• Furthering commitment to education – The new Avid Media Campus program offers a deeper partnership with Avid, and flexible volume licensing and deployment options, to help educators better prepare the next generation of creative talents and media professionals for careers in the media and entertainment industry.
• Avid showcases new 4K/UHD collaborative workflows – Avid is showcasing a technology preview of next-gen server technology to enable media professionals to expand into new end-to-end 4K/UHD workflows for live sports and news production.
• Avid NEXIS intelligent media storage enhancements – Avid NEXIS now offers greater bandwidth scalability and extended workflows with Pro Tools, empowering creative teams with even better speed, efficiency, and collaboration.
• EVS Alliance partnership – New IPLINK for Avid MediaCentral | UX enables Avid users to browse, search, and work with EVS media on the MediaCentral platform in live sports, news, and entertainment workflows.

Avid believes that with MediaCentral in the cloud, a new journey begins. The company claims that  “this exciting new phase of Avid Everywhere provides greater media production flexibility and economic efficiency, enabling you to choose the deployment type that best works for you. And you can make the transition to the cloud at your own pace, as the MediaCentral Platform—the world’s most open, integrated, and collaborative media production ecosystem—serves as your onramp.”

The partnership with Microsoft  and the choice of Microsoft Azure as Avid’s preferred cloud-hosting platform aims to make the journey as easy as possible for users, says Avid. Furthermore, adds Avid, “by choosing Microsoft Azure as your cloud host, you can leverage the openness, global scale, high-level services, and unique hybrid cloud strategy the platform offers. Plus, Azure protects your media and workflows like no other, with a focus on security, privacy, compliancy, and transparency. And it’s all made possible by our flexible approach to licensing, deployment, and commercial options.”

Although cloud hosting from Avid is exclusively offered through Microsoft Azure, users can opt for their preferred cloud-hosting provider if they don’t want to use the service. For more information about the Avid Everywhere cloud visit Avid’s website.