A Talk With Industry Titans at NAB Show 2018
Hillary Lewis March 5, 2024
0 Comments
This article was originally published on April 25th, 2018
Even if you couldn't attend the NAB Show this year, I'm sure you've heard of all the amazing product and software releases by now and are probably stoked about a few of them. There's so many incredible announcements it's hard to keep track. So Creative COW sat down with three of the biggest titans in production and post and discussed the thought process behind their releases, what the big ticket items are, what people might overlook, and their outlooks on the future of the industry.
Avid David Colantuoni, Sr. Director of Product Management at Avid
What were the most exciting releases at Avid Connect this year?
David Colantuoni: Avid Connect announced a wonderful reveal of new products and services, everything from VR to how we covered the Olympics were discussed. It's unbelievable. Plus we introduced Jeff Rosica as Avid's new CEO and he kicked off the Avid Connect event. A couple of advanced things: last year we announced our partnership for Microsoft, who assisted us in taking the platform and building it in the Cloud. We've been working diligently over the last year to release products that work with Microsoft Azure.
We announced Avid | On Demand, which is, at its simplest, editorial on demand. So that's running Media Composer and cloud storage in Microsoft Azure. So if you're an editor you can easily with the click of a button edit in the cloud, without having Media Composer on your laptop or desktop. That's the future. With that, there's a whole host of other things involving archiving content in the cloud.
We also announced Avid | AI, which is using cloud services to enhance the production process as well as cognitive services such as facial recognition and speech recognition. This is a huge part of our cloud initiative, so as we bring our components and move them to the Cloud, Microsoft will offer more features to enhance the production process even further. Those were the biggest components of the announcements.
You can see the full list of Avid's new products mentioned above here
Why is making your software subscription-based such a priority for Avid now?
We're not just at the top of the industry, we're in the corporate environments, we're in the big studios, we're in television production and when we get Media Composer to students and aspiring professionals for free, they can start learning and creating with the same tools the professionals use. It's about accessibility.
And no, we didn't necessarily wait for the Cloud to be released for the subscriptions to become available, they're not mutually exclusive. This is really about us providing students with Pro Tools, Media Composer and Sibelius, but if they're going to work in the cloud someday then that's great and available to them as well.
What's the most overlooked feature Avid is releasing this year?
People might be afraid of the cloud, but it's not necessarily a feature. The common response is I don't know what that is, I don't need a platform. And they don't want to pay attention to it. The way I like to explain it is, don't be afraid of the platform. Don't overlook that the platform is only helping you evolve your workflows to get your work done more efficiently.
Avid MediaCentral media management is a great example of why a platform benefits you and your workflow. What's really cool is you can start to add on to those cloud services, for example if you link the Avid | AI tool to Microsoft Azure now you're adding in all that AI and metadata to do more searching for you. And that's why it's so important. It doesn't change what an editor does everyday, it just makes the creative process easier.
More info on Avid MediaCentral here
How are standards changes incorporated into your pipelines? Do you get ahead of standards changing before they are ratified?
No, we don't normally adapt to standards changing before they're ratified because we've done that in the past and we want to make sure we're in line for the industry. Although 25 years ago that's not how Avid worked, but now we participate in SMPTE standards and IMF creation, etc.
So our philosophy is we participate and adopt as soon as they're ratified. For example, now we're looking to adopt IMF into Media Composer where we weren't before. Same thing with codecs. As they evolve, we adopt them. We're involved in the standard settings in the committees so it makes it easier for us to accept it after it's ratified.
What's the biggest change you see for editors in the future?
Without a doubt it's the cloud. I've talked to a lot of editors and done a lot of presentations, and shown them the cloud, and they are usually convinced they don't need it. And I tell them, Well your boss and your boss's boss are already looking at this and asking about it. Not only that, they have it running and you don't know it. It's incumbent on Avid to make sure that the experience they have today is the same experience they have in the cloud, so that an editor doesn't care. They don't even need their own laptop with Media Composer installed which frees them to edit anywhere, anytime. That's gonna be the biggest change.
Adobe Laura Williams Argilla, Director of Product Management for Creative Cloud
What is most exciting about the Adobe releases this year?
Laura Williams Argilla: The theme of our releases is really about efficiencies and workflow. How do we help people get the best out of the technology that they're using to make the most beautiful, most compelling content in the least amount of time? One of the
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...
A Talk With Industry Titans at NAB Show 2018 
