Avid launches Ready to Play, putting new AI creative capabilities into editors' hands

Avid launches Ready to Play, putting new AI creative capabilities into editors' hands

Brie Clayton November 10, 2026

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Ready to Play enables editors to create, analyze, and modify video within proven Media Composer workflows

New capabilities accelerate the creative process, helping editors visualize ideas, generate temporary footage, and make better use of unlogged video

Launch marks the first new offering to become commercially available through Avid's expanded Google Cloud partnership

Comes at no additional charge from Avid, with access to Google's AI models through eligible Google Cloud billing accounts

Avid today announced Ready to Play, a new AI-powered creative experience for Media Composer developed by Avid and built with Google's AI models, including the family of Gemini models and Veo. Ready to Play enables professional editors and post production teams to create, understand, and transform media, keeping the edit moving when footage is missing, hard to interpret, or not yet finished, all while ensuring editors remain firmly in control of creative decisions.

Ready to Play is the first in a series of new AI offerings planned through Avid's expanded strategic collaboration with Google Cloud, announced earlier this year. Available as an optional extension for Media Composer, Ready to Play initially gives editors access to three AI-enabled workflows - Create Video, Modify Video, and Analyze Video - connecting Google's AI capabilities to the clips, bins, and metadata with which they already work. New media and information are brought into Media Composer for editors to review and use, while preserving existing sequences and original source material. Create Video and Modify Video generate separate outputs instead of changing originals, and Analyze Video adds new AI analysis metadata without overwriting existing metadata.

AI has enormous potential to expand what's possible in post production, and Avid is ready to help editors make the most of it, said Kenna Hilburn, Chief Product Officer at Avid. With Ready to Play, we're bringing powerful new AI capabilities directly into the creative process, giving editors more freedom to experiment, explore ideas, and move projects forward using tools they know and trust. It's about putting the technology to work for editors, so they can focus on what they do best - telling great stories.

Kenna Hilburn, Chief Product Officer at Avid

The launch reflects Avid's commitment to using AI to support human creativity rather than supplant it, an approach endorsed by many professional editors themselves. A recent Avid survey of 120 editors, conducted in partnership with American Cinema Editors (ACE), found that 98% of those who use AI daily or weekly agree it is most valuable when it enhances rather than replaces creative intent, while 76% of these frequent users say AI has helped them work faster. The research found that, among this group, more than 80% also believe AI capabilities should be built into the tools they already use, rather than accessed through a separate application. Ready to Play takes this approach within Media Composer, empowering editors to create placeholder footage and collaborate on ideas with the wider team while keeping creative decisions in their hands.

See the idea. Shape the story As projects take shape, editors often need to work around missing assets, unlogged footage, and unfinished visual elements. Ready to Play helps them tackle these everyday challenges within Media Composer, offering new ways to explore creative possibilities and maintain editorial momentum. Three AI-enabled features support these activities:

Create Video - Enables editors to generate video clips from text prompts or still images which can be extracted directly from clips or sequences in their project, bringing selected results directly into a Media Composer bin. These can be used as temporary B-roll, to visualize scenes before shooting, or as placeholders while final graphics or VFX shots are being prepared.

Modify Video - Allows editors to use text prompts to explore visual changes to existing footage while preserving the original media. For example, editors could remove an unwanted boom mic or other distracting objects from a shot, potentially avoiding a reshoot, or quickly create visual variations to share with collaborators and VFX teams.

Analyze Video - Uses Google AI models to analyze selected footage and generate customizable descriptions that can be added to clip metadata in Media Composer. This helps editors and assistants understand, organize, and locate relevant material, particularly when working with large volumes of unlogged footage.

Ready to Play launches a new family of purpose-built AI experiences across the Avid ecosystem. At IBC2026, Avid previewed Avid Assist, its orchestration and governance layer for AI agents. As part of that vision, Avid offered a first look at Ready to Edit, an upcoming agentic AI tool designed to accelerate project preparation and organization before editing begins. Together, these developments build on Avid's existing AI capabilities, addressing different stages of the editorial process while keeping the focus on expanding, instead of limiting, creative freedom.

Available now as an optional extension for Media Composer Ultimate and Enterprise users, Ready to Play comes at no additional charge from Avid. Access to supported Google Gemini models requires an eligible Google Cloud billing account, with customers managing any applicable usage charges directly through Google Cloud.

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