Demystifying Avid Interplay

Avid by Ian Krabacher

The following is the first in a series of three blog posts from Ian Krabacher, Senior Principal Product Designer on Interplay, that will demystify the Avid Interplay Product Family, with a specific focus on Interplay Production. You can follow Ian on Twitter at @avidiank.

My name is Ian Krabacher and I work as a Senior Principal Product Designer on Interplay, Avid’s asset management product family. I often find that for many folks who’ve banged away on Media Composer, Pro Tools and even Avid shared storage for many years, Interplay is shrouded in utter mystery. “Avid makes Inter-what?!” While this isn’t a total surprise for some reasons I’ll mention in later blog posts, as an editor of more than 15 years and as someone who’s had a hand in building a few successful post environments, I do think we at Avid have done a disservice to the post community by not making it more clear how Interplay can help in an era where tape is rapidly disappearing and where many shops struggle to manage massive sets of in-coming and out-going files. A number of advantages exist within the Interplay line-up that can transform many post workflows by exchanging tedium in favor of creativity and profitability.

For those of you who may have more familiarity with Interplay or were alongside me as a customer at NAB 2006 when Avid introduced Interplay, I know what you are saying: “It does some good things, but it’s too complicated, too expensive, too big and it doesn’t work the way we work.” Understandably, many post professionals never made it past those first impressions and have never looked back—thinking Interplay Production was expressly built for or only useful in news environments.

The truth is that since its inception (and while much of our industry had been justifiably preoccupied with how well Media Composer and Pro Tools would fair feature-for-feature against competitors), Avid has quietly made huge strides with Interplay, succeeding in environments that range both in size and in genre: from news to sports, from drama to unscripted TV and more. It is now deployed in over 1,300 sites worldwide that run the hardest kicked, most aggressive workflows in our industry and furnish a good chunk of the highest rated content watched on a daily basis. read more...

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