Will Avid be the company selling out editors?

The present and future of post production business and technology by Philip Hodgetts

OK, it’s a provocative headline, and while I don’t for a minute think Avid are deliberately setting out to sell out editors, it may be an inevitable result of inevitable technological innovation.

At an executive briefing in LA during the week, Avid noted that their NAB announcements were largely going to be about “the cloud”. That’s pretty much all they announced, so everything else in this post is conjecture and speculation, not rumor or fact.

That said, Avid have been showing ‘technology previews’ of a cloud-based editing application where the interface is local, but all media is served from a remote server across the Internet. Terry Curren and I have discussed cloud-based editing on a couple of shows: Episode 40: Will we be outsourced or automated out of existence? and Episode 26: Is cloud editing the future of editing? In those episodes we mentioned the technology previews of Avid’s Cloud based editor. You can see a preview from NAB 2010 on Avid’s site and I first wrote about it shortly thereafter. Alternatively, Scott Simmons reviewed the preview from 2010 at Pro Video Coalition. read more...