Avid Everywhere – Details from the launch

During Avid Connect, the inaugural event of the Avid Customer Association that took place in Las Vegas this weekend ahead of the NAB Show, the company revealed the next phases of its Avid Everywhere strategic plan.

“The media industry is going through a period of unprecedented change, and to be successful, audio professionals need to create, share, manage, track, and distribute their content in powerful new ways,” stated Chris Gahagan, senior vice president of Products and Services at Avid.

The event saw over 1,000 broadcast, pro audio, and video professionals from 43 countries attend to hear about the future plans of one of the most important media technology companies. 

For audio professionals there are three main points at the core of Avid Everywhere: cloud collaboration workflows, an online marketplace, and an open metadata schema.

Cloud Collaboration:

We truly are in the age of collaboration and Avid has announced plans to add cloud-based collaboration workflows to Pro Tools, which will allow musicians, producers, and mixers (and any other contributors) to work together on the same music session or soundtrack in real-time or offline.

According to Avid, with track-based collaborations, Pro Tools users will be able to:

  • Post sessions to cloud storage and invite others to collaborate
  • Work on the same session at the same time or offline, and share updates directly within Pro Tools
  • Record, edit, and mix tracks that will be pushed to all other collaborators upon completion
  • Automatically keep track of all contributions and changes, as files are automatically tagged with rich metadata

With streaming capabilities, users will be able to:

  • Securely stream mixes to an iOS device for real-time review and approval
  • Sync collaborators’ Pro Tools sessions together to work on audio for video projects, such as remote ADR or voiceover sessions
  • Stream audio across synched Pro Tools sessions

This brings up the question of how to ensure easy collaborative workflows between users with different plug-ins or on different systems. Avid has addressed this by announcing the development of the PXF archival – a format that will enable Pro Tools sessions to be exported with rich metadata and effects ‘frozen’ into the media so that projects can be accessed and played further down the line, even if technologies change or are unavailable.

Increasing Monetisation:

Another core focus of Avid Everywhere is to increase monetisation options for content creators through a new, public marketplace. According to Avid, studios and media companies will also be able to set up private marketplaces the enable collaboration and streamline production.

Through the public marketplace audio professionals will be able to:

  • Publish session files, multi-channel stems, and stereo mixdowns directly from Pro Tools for license in the public marketplace
  • Gain exposure and opportunities to make money by connecting with media professionals looking to license music and sound assets
  • Quickly find professional-quality content in the style and formats they need, as all files will contain rich, searchable metadata
  • Rate and provide comments for media assets in the marketplace to help others in the community make more informed purchasing decisions
  • Buy and sell music and audio content with peace of mind, as all rights will be managed and protected across the marketplace
  • Create a private marketplace for media enterprise, making it possible to sell media assets, and control to whom they are available, through a storefront hosted in Avid’s marketplace
  • Search for and purchase marketplace content and audio plug-ins directly from within Pro Tools—with no application restart required after installation

Managing Metadata:

Lastly, Avid is proposing a new universal open metadata schema integrated into Pro Tools that will "enable users to manage, protect, and track every single media asset created and edited across the entire production and media value chain, from content creation through consumption". The metadata schema will document the roles of all creative contributors, as well as manage, protect, and track how the media performs in the marketplace.

Click here to read more about Avid Everywhere on the Avid website.