Avid Previews Breakthrough Audio Innovations, Delivering on Avid Everywhere Vision

Company shows how new cloud collaboration workflows, online marketplace, and open metadata schema for Pro Tools software will make Avid Everywhere a reality for audio

Avid® (NAB Booth #SU902) today previewed pro audio innovations supporting the Avid Everywhere™ strategic vision for the media and entertainment industry, that will help audio professionals connect, create, and collaborate in more powerful, efficient, and profitable ways. The company unveiled cloud collaboration workflows, an online marketplace, and an open metadata schema that empowers audio professionals to easily work together with remote contributors, manage projects and media, and find new outlets for content monetization.

“The media industry is going through a period of unprecedented change, and to be successful, audio professionals need to create, share, manage, track, and distribute their content in powerful new ways,” stated Chris Gahagan, senior vice president of Products and Technology at Avid. “Our exciting Pro Tools® technology preview demonstrates how the Avid Everywhere strategic vision meets the unique needs of audio customers by enabling them to collaborate via the cloud, monetize their content through a broader marketplace, and manage content more powerfully using an open metadata schema.”

Through a series of presentations at NAB, Avid will preview several key technological innovations for Pro Tools audio software, which will enable artists, producers, engineers, sound designers, and remixers to:

Collaborate via the cloud — To enable music and audio professionals to collaborate together everywhere, Avid announced plans to add cloud-based collaboration workflows to Pro Tools. Musicians, producers, mixers and other contributors will be able to work together on the same music session or soundtrack, in real-time or offline, no matter where they are.

With track-based collaboration Pro Tools users will be able to:

• Post sessions to cloud storage and invite others to collaborate
• Work on the same session at the same time or offline, and share updates directly within Pro Tools
• Record, edit, and mix tracks that will be pushed to all other collaborators upon completion
• Automatically keep track of all contributions and changes, as files are automatically tagged with rich metadata

With streaming capabilities, users will be able to:

• Securely stream mixes to an iOS device for real-time review and approval
• Sync collaborators’ Pro Tools sessions together to work on audio for video projects, such as remote ADR or voiceover sessions
• Stream audio across synched Pro Tools sessions

Securely share and archive work locally or in the cloud — To ensure that users can maintain access and provide collaborators access to all parts of their projects—even on systems that don't have the same plug-ins—Avid is developing the PXF archival. This format will enable Pro Tools sessions to be exported with rich metadata and effects “frozen” into the media so that projects can be accessed and played further down the line, even if technologies change or are unavailable, no matter how far out in the future users re-access them.

Monetize content through an online marketplace — Content creators will be able to connect and collaborate with other media professionals, as well as connect with consumers, through a public marketplace, enabling them to share and monetize media, with all rights managed and delivery secured across the environment. Additionally, studios and media companies will be able to set up private marketplaces that enable collaboration and streamline production.

Unlike social music sites that simply allow music sharing and promotion, the audio marketplace will help artists forge more meaningful connections with the entire audio community, enabling them to connect with other media professionals and creators to share, collaborate, enhance, promote, and sell their work, publicly or privately.

The new marketplace will allow audio professionals to:

• Publish session files, multichannel stems, and stereo mixdowns directly from Pro Tools for license in the public marketplace
• Gain exposure and opportunities to make money by connecting with media professionals looking to license music and sound assets
• Quickly find professional-quality content in the style and formats they need, as all files will contain rich, searchable metadata
• Rate and provide comments for media assets in the marketplace to help others in the community make more informed purchasing decisions
• Buy and sell music and audio content with peace of mind, as all rights will be managed and protected across the marketplace
• Create a private marketplace for media enterprise, making it possible to sell media assets, and control to whom they are available, through a storefront hosted in Avid’s marketplace
• Search for and purchase marketplace content and audio plug-ins directly from within Pro Tools—with no application restart required after installation

Manage content using a new metadata schema — A new universal open metadata schema will enable users to manage, protect, and track every single media asset created and edited across the entire production and media value chain, from content creation through consumption. The metadata schema will be integrated into Pro Tools, and document the roles of all creative contributors, as well as manage, protect, and track how the media performs in the marketplace.