Adobe, Avid, Blackmagic Design: The Big 3 NLEs at NAB 2019

Adobe, Avid, Blackmagic Design: The Big 3 NLEs at NAB 2019

Hillary Lewis January 19, 2024

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This year at the NAB Show 2019 we saw some of the most anticipated releases in video editing software history.

Perhaps the most celebrated is Avid Media Composer's new user interface, coming out end of May with a release that also includes a 32 bit full float color pipeline, ACES support, and other improvements for finishing.

A refreshed user experience has been at the top of many user's feature request lists for years, and after nearly six years of Avid Customer Association feedback and a handful of annual ACA votes which ask users to rank their needs, a new UI has emerged. This was undoubtedly no small task, as Avid had to tear down a 25 year foundation and create an experience that would appease new and veteran users.

Avid's facelift also comes with shiny new code, making performance faster than before. Sloughing off the excess and cutting down time wasted loading projects, importing, and exporting. They now offer background rendering and transcoding and live timelines with edit-during-playback.

Adobe and Blackmagic Design have done the same with Premiere Pro and Resolve 16 respectively, announcing huge innovative leaps towards AI and machine learning. Their newest features alleviate common tedious editing tasks, while boasting faster and more efficient ways of GPU performance.

on the ground at Avid Connect and NAB Show in Las Vegas, NV

Rob D'Amico Director of Product Marketing for Audio & Video Solutions CreativeCOW: Everyone is buzzing about the new UI, can you talk about what's new for Media Composer 2019?Rob D'Amico: Out of the gate with Media Composer it's all about a better user experience with a new UI, removing some of the clutter and having that panel view so you can move around really fluently and easily. Having the task-based workspaces and being able to rearrange your layout quickly based on what part of production you're in, for audio mixing versus editing and effects versus grading and coloring.

Media Composer 2019 Edit Workspace

Media Composer 2019 Audio Workspace

Bin map view located top right

We've rebuilt our engine to support 32-bit floating color pipeline, so you can have confidence round-tripping with other applications that your color won't get clipped or your file support is adhered to. We're going to natively support OP1A, so you can drop in the media files and it'll show up in your Media Tool [instead of using AMA Linking].

We've also worked closely with The Academy to support ACES color space natively right within Media Composer. They're creating a new category called Editorial Finishing Category, based on the work that we did to support that color space. And as far as the work that we're doing for delivery, we now support directly out of Media Composer exporting IMF packaging. And also inputting into it for a complete round trip workflow.

How will you be able to measure when people adopt the new user interface and where do you expect that usage to be in the next couple of years? When are you hoping for users to switch over?

One of the things that we did in leading up to this new UI, is a direct reflection of customer feedback. We have Avid's ACA, the Avid Customer Association. We work directly with many members of the ACA and getting their feedback early on even in the wire frame modelling of this new UI. All the way through to the alpha program and continuous to the beta program.

So to answer your question, this isn't a one and done update. This update, once we release at the end of May, is going to continue throughout the year to make sure that one we're meeting the constant needs of our customers and also new customers.

We want to make sure the next generation editor feels comfortable coming over to a Media Composer or working in a Media Composer that feels modern. We don't want to be known as that dinosaur video editor. We're the leader in what we created there and we're going to continue that innovation.

It's been on the mind of everybody here. We have a long history of editors using Media Composer, grew up on Media Composer, and don't really like change. They've been using a tool, they know how to use it, don't change it. That's why it was so important to get their input in a lot of this.

Media Composer 2019's release at the end of May, along with Media Composer | Distributed Processing, goes beyond background rendering and transcoding, allowing users to completely offload processor-intensive tasks to other machines, either idle or dedicated, that are on their network. And the newest member of the family: Media Composer | Enterprise which allows you to adapt all of Media Composer's capabilities for different roles in your organization.

Steve Forde General Manager, Emerging Products, Digital Video and Audio COW: What are the most exciting Adobe features coming out at the show?

Steve Forde: Content Aware Fill is probably the most popular one. It's probably the biggest response for everything out of the releases. Basically, Content Aware Fill comes from Photoshop around five or six years ago, and it's oriented around still image manipulation. We always wanted to figure out how can we do this for video.

Whether you want to remove microphones or wires or rigs, something that came into a shot that just didn't make it perfect. And instead of reshooting, which is expensive and time consuming, Content Aware Fill uses machine learning and AI to remove an object frame by frame with the surrounding pixels. That's where the AI comes in and understands them contextually to get a clean removal of the object.

Somebody made a video just yesterday using Friends footage from the TV show where, in four and a half

LINK:	https://creativecow.net/adobe-avid-blackmagic-design-the-big-3-nles-at...
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