Here we are at the Avid Connect 2016 event at the Wynn in Las Vegas. This is the third Avid Customer Associaton (ACA) event and my first one.
This really is a big event.
“By working through our challenges we emerge better. We emerge stronger.” Those are the words we begin with.
Avid needed to change with the times, make products more integrated.
When you look at some of this stuff Avid is involved in you realize how much more they have in their portfolio than just Media Composer. It’s the most important thing to us editors but it’s really a small part of Avid. An important product for sure but just a small piece of the puzzle. When you read and article about where Avid went wrong and it blames Premiere or Final Cut Pro just know there is a whole lot more to the story than that.
We got treated to several quick case studies of installations around the world as to how they are using Avid solutions. Avid is very integrated in news and broadcast around the world. That is more than just Media Composer installs as they are part of an entire infrastructure for a lot of these companies. There was a specific mention of Avid storage being open and working with Adobe Premiere in one of their videos. They wouldn’t have put that in there if it wasn’t important.
“Netflix is spending more on original content than any other media conglomerate.”
Avid has branches and technology centers all over the world: Taiwan, Manila, Poland, Boca Raton, FL.
New products and innovation will accelerate this year.
And here’s the new products.
“Something that will change the way you work.”
ProTools and cloud collaboration. They are showing the use of the Avid artist community to use the community to find some guitar for a spot. They found George Lynch of Dokken and Lynch Mob fame to help with a Porsche spot.
They are using a real time chat window to communicate with Lynch and lay down a riff for the spot. No email, no Dropbox as the guitar session comes down in real time right into the session. Any missing plugins can be purchased via the Avid Marketplace. I’d be nice to see some Marketplace love in Media Composer. There’s a Pro Tools iOS app to control Pro Tools!
There is cloud collaboration tools built in to Pro Tools that was turned on to allow this. Coming soon to the rest of the Avid apps.
This is about different partners who are certified and connect with the Avid ecosystem.
GlobalLogic and the FileSystem Connector for finding media across Interplay, archives and the entire MediaCentral platform. This is big ecosystem stuff way beyond a Media Composer install. Remember when I said that Media Composer is a small part of a larger puzzle?
Root6 Technology and ContentAgent. Makes content card and file ingest fast and easy.
x.news. Social media feeds in a dashboard right in a workflow. This is for journalists to search and build information for news.
Big productions and companies need a reseller like Keycode to bring all this together. No just Media Composer as there is a lot of technology that makes this possible. 
Avid is showing openness by demoing Premiere Pro running on the MediaCentral platform. An Adobe rep An Avid rep doing the demo showed his I Heart Adobe t-shirt. (I thought he was from Adobe but chatting after he’s from Avid).
Avid is also involved in a lot of graphics, play out and live video products. These are things way beyond just Media Composer. Half of this stuff I have never heard of.
Finally today, revolutionary technology. Avid NEXIS.
20 terabytes to over 1 petabyte. Scalable, collaboration friendly, 300 realtime editing seats, can survive a full chassis of data loss without losing data, no mention of cost. And it’s not named ISIS.
No mention of Media Composer in this keynote. I wouldn’t read much into that since we just got Media Composer 8.5 earlier this year. I would have thought they would have pointed that update out since it was such a good update but no Media Composer love. That once again points back to how there is so much more to Avid than Media Composer. In fact Premiere Pro was mentioned more in this Avid keynote than Media Composer.
The Avid Connect keynote is over! I posted this from an iPad app, first time ever so I hope it worked. Off to some sessions.