A Talk With Industry Titans at NAB Show 2018

A Talk With Industry Titans at NAB Show 2018

Hillary Lewis March 5, 2024

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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

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