The new executive team from Avid Technology wants to closely collaborate with customers to make them, and the company, profitable again. At an IBC press breakfast Gary G. Greenfield, the new Chief Executive Officer and President, said he wants to develop “integrated fluid workflows” that combine several of its product lines to the benefit of customers.

Among his stated “go-to-market strategies,” Greenfield said that as Avid moves into its second generation of operations (the company was founded roughly 20 years ago) he wants to “help customers climb the aspirational ladder, from enthusiast to working professional.”

Working with third-party companies is another critical key to the company’s success.

At IBC Avid demonstrated Avid DS version 10 on the exhibit floor. [That’s’ right, Avid is back to exhibiting at trade shows, something it said was not worth the investment a year ago.] The system is designed to handle editing, compositing, keying, image retouching, paint and graphics in one application.

Avid DS 10 runs on a redesigned platform and includes color-managed workflows, advanced color-correction capabilities, improved conform options, GPU real-time processing, additional dual-link feature support, integration with Avid shared storage solutions, and a new stereoscopic 3D container.

The Avid DS system also offers multi-stream, 10-bit uncompressed HD, the Avid DNxHD codec, and SD finishing and mastering as well as HD-RGB and 2K/4K file-based editing with real-time playback up to 2K.

The new version also features the option to output to SDI in native 720p23.98 or cross-convert to 1080p23.98 in real time.

Avid has enhanced its color management tool to allow customers to preserve color definitions and define and manage look-up tables (LUTs). Users can create RGB sequences using specific LUTs and view complex LUTs in the system’s viewer. The system now offers support for 3D LUTs with the Thomson LuTher system, Kodak KDM, Iridas .itx formats and extended 1D LUT support to tape-based capture.

Improvements have also been made to the software’s DPX parser to implement several DPX 2.0 capabilities which support RGB and RGBA formats including Filmlight’s RBGA. And Avid DS will now be able to perform file-based DPX conforms from AFEs (Avid File Exchange) originating from Avid Media Composer and Avid Symphony systems.

At IBC Avid also announced the availability of the Media Toolkit and Interplay Web Services, a pair of developer packages that encourage third-party development.

Avid Media Toolkit is designed to improve the way developers create, read and exchange Avid MXF media files with other industry applications. Avid Interplay Web Services API is a high-level SOA interface that enables customers and integrators to seamlessly incorporate Interplay into customized automated workflows. [One of the first installments of the Web Services API was used in the production of the 2008 Summer Games.]

For more information, visit www.avid.com/thirdparty/developers/