Buzz : post production, NAB, Post Production Facility

Avid Announces New EUCON Partners at NAB 2012

Mark Williams — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 01:19:00 GMT

More exciting news to share with you from the show floor at NAB 2012. This week Avid announced that content creators will be able to use Avid Artist Series controllers to control the recording, editing, and mixing features of the upcoming release of Adobe® Audition® CS6 software, the transport and color grading features of Digital Vision® Phoenix® and the live color and image definition features of Pomfort® LiveGrade® via native support for Avid’s EUCON™ Ethernet control protocol. Avid is committed to driving openness across the industry, and today’s announcement adds key professional software solutions to a list of EUCON supported titles from industry leading companies like Autodesk, Blackmagic Design, RED, and Steinberg.

“This week's announcement demonstrates how far Avid has come in developing an open ecosystem of third-party workflows based around the EUCON Protocol,” said Martin Kloiber, vice president of products and solutions at Avid. “We remain focused on driving the interoperability of our audio and video solutions, and we are proud to work with industry leaders like Adobe, Digital Vision and Pomfort in the pursuit of that vision. Our expanded partnerships enable us to provide creative professionals with deep, integrated control over their favorite applications and flexible workflows to do their best work.”

These new partnerships validate Avid’s efforts to provide customers with open solutions that work with a range of products in the content creation ecosystem, delivering highly responsive tactile control of many of the world’s leading creative applications. Compact and portable enough to fit into any setup, Avid's Artist Series controllers combine best-in-class industrial design, a highly responsive feel, and extensive functionality.

“We're excited to have fully integrated EUCON support into Adobe Audition CS6," says Colin Stefani, senior manager, professional video at Adobe. "The quality and flexibility of the Avid Artist Series controllers is a perfect match for the advanced feature set of Adobe Audition CS6. Whether recording, mixing, or performing audio restoration, the combination of these powerful solutions can really help make your audio and video productions sound their best."

EUCON is Avid’s open, high-speed Ethernet control protocol that allows Avid Artist Series control surfaces and other consoles and controllers to connect to a variety of third party creative audio and video software solutions, delivering deep, integrated control over multiple applications and workstations, resulting in increased efficiencies and cost-effective workflow expansions. EUCON is currently supported by a wide cross section of Macintosh- and Windows-based applications.

"Excellent quality and a competitive price make the Artist Color grading panel the perfect partner for the use of LiveGrade on-set,” adds Patrick Renner, managing director at Pomfort. "Our users like the direct interaction with the image they get with our software products - and Artist Color supports this with professional, physical controls."

“This will be an exciting NAB for Digital Vision," concludes Torbjörn Dyrvold, Digital Vision’s Phoenix & DVO Product Manager. "Together with the introduction of our new video restoration system for broadcast and archival material, we are also showing the integration of the Avid Artist panel into Phoenix Finish, our high end film and video restoration and mastering system. We looked at several alternatives and chose the Avid Artist Color panel as it provides an economic and compact solution for controlling our advanced color tools, allowing the Phoenix users to operate the system with ease and speed."

Stop by the Avid booth (#SU902) to see EUCON in action, and congratulations to our new partners on their announcements

Avid at the 2011 NAB Show: Al Kovalick "Planning for the Cloud"

Mark Williams — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 23:06:00 GMT

"Do you use the cloud? Raise your hand if you do," asked Avid Senior Fellow Al Kovalick. About half the standing room only NAB Session audience raised their hands. "If you didn't raise your hand, you should have." Al then proceeded in his wonderful, precise, and humorous way to present his paper on the subject of "Planning for the Cloud" at one of Monday's first NAB Sessions. He provided attendees with an in-depth look at the current state of cloud computing and glimpse into the future of the newest, and perhaps least well understood technological revolution currently underway.

Al's presentation was entitled, "Essential Concepts and Apps for the Media Facility" and over the course of his talk he laid out the basic architecture of the cloud, examined the public and private adoption of three distinct cloud types, surveyed the benefits and drawbacks, and finished with a look to the near-future, defining the ways content creators and media managers could plan to take advantage of the maturing technology.

Cloud computing is any type of computing in which services and computational resources are provided over the internet. Al explained how there were three types of cloud computing: platform services (such as Salesforce.com,) software services (such as Google Docs) and infrastructure services (from simple file storage to complex, expandable cloud networks like Amazon EC2 AWS.) The main benefits of providing services and platforms entirely over the internet are it's ease of scalability, it's agile and dynamic provisioning, the heavy use of automations and virtualization, trade offs of Capex for Opex (the accountants reading this just perked up) and the savings of hard costs related to running large networks (power, cooling, space, management, reliability, etc.) Power and cooling alone account for a third of a network's cost according to a graph shown. So the increase in efficiency is welcome in many ways.

The solutions cloud computing can provide media professionals are profound. From offline archiving to transcoding, development and distribution, the cloud can offer an enormous return on investment, allowing companies to free up valuable resources while benefiting from networks far more reliable than any hardware array.

"So, what are the threats, the downsides?" Al asked. Security was first and foremost amongst them. This included securing your data from loss, protecting your networks from being hijacked, and the unknowns presented by putting so much of your business in the hands of a company you might not know enough about.

And perhaps the two greatest hurdles facing the rapid expansion of cloud computing Al explained were the same old digital nemeses that have plagued computing and networks from the very beginning. "Latency and bandwidth" he announced. However with so many resources being contributed to broadly addressing those issues, Al was confident that in the future the cloud would be "an integrated part of not only media enterprise, but of our daily lives as well."

"By 2020 most people will be using cloud based applications daily," he concluded, "and will be living a digital hybrid life." The market is already exploding he noted, with cloud computing revenues expected to exceed $150 billion by 2013.

Many thanks to Avid Fellow Al Kovalick for an informative and insightful presentation. Keep an eye on Avid Buzz, a blog composed, distributed and viewed entirely in the cloud, all week for more news and updates.

And don't miss the opportunity to catch Al tomorrow, Wednesday the 13th at 12:30 and 1:00 for his presentation of "FIMS is Heating Up" at the FIMS booth N3134.

At NAB 2011, Avid is participating in a joint technology demo along with Sony, IBM, Cinegy, Radiant Grid and Cube-Tec, who are are working cooperatively and showing file-based camera capture, ingest, transcoding, audio processing and final display in a Media Composer timeline. "This is the world’s first demo of FIMS and promises to be the start of a new way to build efficient media workflows." Al said in his Inside Out blog post on the presentation. "Come hear what all the buzz is about."

Avid at the 2011 NAB Show: Every Customer Has a Choice

Mark Williams — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 13:02:00 GMT

Avid has been working with it’s customers like never before, and we've been making good on our promises to deliver the tools and solutions our customers need to realize their creative visions. Check out this pretty amazing video we made for NAB. Relationships are about choice, of course, and who you partner with can make all the difference when it comes to creative production. I consider myself lucky enough to work with some of the most talented people in the business, both within Avid and among our incredible customers. And these partnerships have allowed Avid to develop solutions that address real needs, and operate seamlessly within modern interoperable workflows. What we have achieved together so far is truly inspiring. And I truly can’t even imagine what we can achieve working together in the months and years to come. But I know some of you can. As a matter of fact, you’re probably already working on it. Today.

Keep checking Avid Buzz for more NAB news, videos and updates all week!