Avid today unveiled a number of new integrations with third parties, designed to give customers more infrastructure and format flexibility within their broadcast and post production workflows. Omneon, Panasonic, Sony and RED are among the companies that will demonstrate new workflow integrations with Avid at the National Association of Broadcasters Show this week. This collaborative development is part of the company’s ongoing commitment to provide open solutions that work with a majority of third-party formats, plug-ins and technologies, ultimately placing greater flexibility and choice in customers’ hands.

Server Integrations
Leveraging the Video Disk Control Protocol (VDCP) capabilities built into Avid’s iNEWS ® Command 2.0 release announced last month as a part of the Avid HD News Solution, customers can now take advantage of smooth integration with a variety of production servers, including Omneon’s MediaDeck and Spectrum production systems.

“As a result of the qualification of the Omneon MediaDeck and Spectrum media servers, our joint customers can produce HD programming more efficiently,” said John Ison, vice president of marketing, Omneon, Inc. “With assistance from Omneon, Avid has completed comprehensive testing and performance verification of our solutions working together and we are confident that our customers will benefit greatly from this new integration.”

Customers will now be able to save time and costs as a result of this new integration including:
• The ability to edit Sony XDCAM HD media without transcoding, as a result of the seamless transfer of media from qualified Omneon media servers to the Avid production environment.
• The ability to export finished stories directly to Omneon servers for immediate playback, via a quick and easy drop down menu selection in Avid editing systems.

Camera Formats
Last month, Avid introduced Avid Media Access (AMA), a new plug-in architecture that automatically links clips from third-party volume devices into an Avid editing bin including enhanced metadata support ‘ removing time and resource-consuming transcode processes. Now broadcasters and post production professionals can easily acquire, network, edit, manage, control and playback a variety of camera formats from Avid systems.

The introduction of Avid’s AMA plug-in has enabled the company to offer native support for Panasonic P2 (DVCPRO/ 50/ HD and 10 bit AVC-Intra 100/ 50 (MPEG-4/ H.264 HD) and Sony XDCAM HD (LongGOP HD MPEG2) content across its newsroom, television and film solutions.

Robert Harris, vice president of marketing and product development, Panasonic Broadcast & Television Systems Co., said, “Panasonic and Avid have collaborated on file-based workflow implementation from the inception of P2 and that has greatly enhanced the productivity of our customers. With the momentum of more than 110,000 solid state P2 products sold worldwide, we are pleased that Avid continues to work with us to develop innovative tools for customers.”

“Sony’s relationship with Avid helps our customers to work seamlessly with their preferred recording formats, and broadcast and television platforms,” said Jay Dishong, vice president of marketing, Sony’s Broadcast and Production Systems Division. “As recording formats continue to evolve in the industry today, collaboration between production and post production leaders is critical so that our customers can continue to work with ultimate flexibility throughout the creative process.”

Further, with the recent announcement of its native support for the RED R3D file format, Avid is accelerating the editorial and finishing process for customers shooting with the RED Digital Cinema camera. Users now benefit from a complete RED-based offline to online workflow with Avid MetaFuze ®, Media Composer ® and Avid DS solutions. The Avid RED pipeline provides speedy ingest of footage, the ability to apply RLX color intent data to the footage, and the ability to preset project and sequence settings for RED projects at 2k, 3k, and 4k resolutions.

Transmission Automation
Avid’s Sundance Digital ® Titan™ and FastBreak NXT broadcast automation systems now support the new Omneon MediaDeck GX server, a complete broadcast channel-playout solution. As a result, broadcasters can easily integrate the new Omneon server with their existing Sundance Digital automation management system, without experiencing the downtime often associated with configuration or setup.

On-Air Graphics
Avid also announced today that its Deko ® 3000 version 5.2 now supports the industry-standard FBX and Collada file formats. As a result, customers can easily import 3D models and animations from leading industry applications such as Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Softimage 7.5 and MAXON CINEMA 4D.

Shared Storage
Apple Final Cut Pro editing solutions are now qualified to run on Avid Unity™ MediaNetwork and ISIS ® shared storage systems. Post facilities, broadcasters and other media content creation organizations using Final Cut Pro can now take advantage of the industry-leading shared storage and collaborative workflow capabilities of Avid Unity and ISIS and benefit from simultaneously running Avid and Final Cut Pro editing solutions on the same shared storage system.

“Our customers have asked us to be more open and we are delivering,” said Dana Ruzicka, vice president of strategic alliances at Avid. “More than ever, Avid is leveraging strategic collaborations with other industry leaders to enable today’s broadcast and post production professionals to have the flexibility to work the way they want to work. Whether it’s an independent producer looking to quickly load footage into Media Composer in the field, or a large broadcaster looking to put together a best-of- breed HD workflow in the newsroom, we’re focused on optimizing our solutions to give our customers what they need to be successful.”