At Avid Connect today in Las Vegas, Avid announced what it’s calling an all-new Media Composer. The company said it had rebuilt its flagship NLE from the ground up, dramatically rethinking the user interface, deploying a more powerful media engine, and enabling a 32-bit full float color pipeline for finishing and delivery inside the application.
“After receiving input from hundreds of editors and teams across the media industry, and knowing where the industry is headed, we reimagined Media Composer, the product that created the nonlinear video editing category and remains the gold standard,” said Avid President and CEO Jeff Rosica in a prepared statement. “Media Composer 2019 is both evolutionary and revolutionary. It maintains what longtime users know and love while giving them more of what they need today—and what they will need tomorrow.”
Taking a cue from the competition, Media Composer 2019 will offer a modernized interface, with a selection of customizable, panel-based workspaces geared toward different tasks, such as Edit, Color, Effects and Audio. The new Media Composer also offers highly interactive ways to organize and navigate media bins, including “bin mapping” windows that show everything in a bin. You can get an idea of what’s possible by watching the Avid demo video below.
A new set of customizable tools in the Enterprise version will allow the environment to be tuned specifically for the different needs of editors, assistants, loggers and producers, with security controls to match every defined role, Avid said. Users will have access to only the specific tools and functions they need.
The new Avid Media Engine supports native MXF OP1A media, background rendering and, as an add-on option, network-distributed processing, the company said. Avid also claims the new engine will increase the number of video and audio streams a Media Composer system can handle.
4K, 8K and 16K (yes, that’s a raster of 16,384 x 8640) will be among the options for projects in Media Composer 2019, which is now billed as a complete 32-bit full float finishing and delivery tool — that’s where Avid’s 32-bit DNxUncompressed format, announced at IBC last year, comes into its own. HDR, ACES workflow, and OpenEXR are supported along with IMF delivery, and Avid says it’s working with unspecified OTT content providers on future delivery standards.
Avid said Media Composer 2019 will be a spring upgrade for Media Composer, Media Composer First, Media Composer Ultimate and Media Composer Enterprise. A preview of the new version is available at the Avid website, with an option to sign up to be notified when it’s released.
Also at Avid Connect today, the company announced Avid Nexis Cloudspaces — an easy way for small-t0-medium-size users with Avid Nexis storage on-premise to easily move media to the cloud in order to free up high-performance storage locally. Cloudspaces are managed alongside local workspaces through the Nexis management console, making it easy to control the movement of projects and media.
Avid Nexis Cloudspaces will be sold on a subscription basis, with a selection of different plans available, starting later this month.
Avid Media Composer 2019: www.avid.com
