The world of media production is now more distributed than ever, with teams located on-premises, across towns, countries, and continents, and even at home. Regardless of location, Avid’s solutions make post-production collaboration simple, reliable, and as if the team is in the same room.
Avid product evangelists Craig Wilson, in Aberdeen, Scotland, and Michael Krulik, in Burbank, California, recently
led a
webinar to demonstrate the post-production collaboration tools Avid has developed to meet the unique needs of remote and distributed media teams. These solutions allow broadcast teams to plan, assign tasks, share content, review media, and more, whether they are working at home, on location, or in the office.
Wilson and Krulik share how Avid MediaCentral and Media Composer work together to address a variety of broadcast post-production collaboration needs including creating editorial content for short and long-form production, enabling geographically dispersed teams to quickly create highlights out of remote live feeds, and creating highlights for multi-camera reality shows. They demonstrate how to employ remote production workflows to share rough cuts, edits, and notes from anywhere, and deliver work from the edit suite to any platform.
Easy ingest and playout: MediaCentral | Stream
Wilson highlights the importance of being able to easily move media, whether it’s broadcast news, sports, or remote live production, into a system by using a file ingest software.
With the increasing use of IP-based contribution, Avid developed a scalable solution to meet the industry’s needs. MediaCentral | Stream is a simple and reliable way to ingest and playout multiple incoming compressed IP streams into the Avid MediaCentral production environment from anywhere. It supports recording of the most common IP stream protocols including RTMP and SRT and playout of SRT, with a flexible architecture to enable additional protocols in future versions. Other benefits include moving live content between remote locations at lower costs and editing and playout while capturing media for ultra-fast turnaround.
“The important thing here is that the stream that's coming in on the fly is now being converted into the house codec format within the system itself,” Wilson says. “So there's no break in the production workflow. It's all very simple and straightforward. And of course, this media is now available for anyone using the system to actually come in and access securely.”
Access on the go: MediaCentral | Collaborate
MediaCentral | Collaborate is an app which is part of the web-based Media Central | Cloud UX. The tool connects teams in the studio, in the field, or at home using any device. It allows for planning stories, gathering resources, assigning tasks, tracking projects, updating job status, and makes it easy to share content whether on or off premises. MediaCentral | Collaborate is also available in the MediaCentral | Cloud UX panel inside of Media Composer, in Adobe Creative Cloud products including Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Photoshop, and as an iOS app.
Collaborate makes it easy for team members to see all the people and resources available to help them complete their tasks. Users can view contact information for team members, freelancers, and guests, view gear and vehicles available, and link media, research, stories, and graphics to help others with assignments.
“The key is collaboration and about having what we would class as a single solution,” Wilson says.
Integrated solution: MediaCentral | Cloud UX + Media Composer + Avid NEXIS
Wilson and Krulik review how MediaCentral | Cloud UX and Media Composer are closely integrated, along with MediaCentral | Production Management and Avid NEXIS shared storage, to provide the collaborative solutions needed.
MediaCentral | Cloud UX offers many tools combined into one application, enabling distributed media production teams to access different systems and content. One of the biggest benefits Wilson demonstrates in MediaCentral | Cloud UX is its search functionality allowing quick searches across any system.
“You can search on any of the metadata in the systems, you can have search favorites. You can also have a search history,” Wilson comments.
After securely logging in, either on premises or remotely, users can choose from a range of apps which support their workflow needs.
“Whether you're working in a broadcast environment where perhaps you want to do a viewing of media, perhaps some logging, some editing, that's all possible here, or you're working in news environment. It has lots of applications there, too,” Wilson says. “The key is that it's web-based, so you're able to access it from any location.”
Krulik reviews several new tools available in Media Composer including an SRT function that mimics the over-the-shoulder collaborative workflows that existed when teams worked together on site. This capability enables anyone with the appropriate permissions to securely review a sequence at high quality from anywhere, using supported devices like a mobile phone or on a larger screen via VLC player, for example.
“This gives anybody the ability to go in and do sort of a review and approval of what is being played out for Media Composer at any time.” Krulik explains. “It’s a really great way to go in and collaborate.”
At the end of the demonstration, Wilson and Krulik answer questions from the global audience with Wilson summing up the key goal of Avid’s solutions and tools.
“It’s really about collaboration without boundaries,” Wilson says.
Watch the demonstrations firsthand to get more detail on how to boost your team’s post-production collaboration and workflow power now, in the webinar.
Want to know more about Avid’s unique post-production collaboration tools for media production, news, and more?