Faster and better. Those demands keep pushing the broadcast news industry to find new ways to produce and share content. To help unify and strengthen that process, Avid has delivered a number of new tools to support story planning, project tracking, content sharing, IP streaming ingest and playout workflows to enhance customers’ newsroom operations. Whether you are a reporter in the field on mobile, an editor in the craft suite, a journalist on a laptop, or a producer in the control room, these features offer multiple benefits including enabling collaboration from anywhere.
“Newsroom workflows are a major area of development for Avid and lately we have been focusing on several key aspects of it such as cloud deployments, scalability, and security,” says Régis André, senior director, product management, creative products, storage, cloud.
Avid’s newest workflow innovations were recently showcased in a live webinar, “Stop, Collaborate, and Listen – Avid’s News Solutions in Action.” Three other Avid experts joined André in demonstrating the story-centric news tools: Claudia Roth, senior solutions specialist, video; Imran Ramzan, presales solution specialist, media & enterprise; and Craig Wilson, product evangelist, broadcast & media enterprise product marketing, media & cloud.
No boundary limits and new linking power
André kicked off the webinar by highlighting key updates and additions to MediaCentral, Avid’s comprehensive media workflow platform:
- Extending iNEWS capabilities further into the web-based MediaCentral Cloud UX to offer users the ability to move to a web user interface, making it easier to access rundowns, wires, and stories
- Streamline workflows and ways stories can be built, and manage different distribution channels beyond broadcast, like social media with MediaCentral Publisher workflows
- The expansion of MediaCentral | Collaborate which is taking Avid’s news workflows into the next generation of story-centric production
“You can think of MediaCentral | Collaborate as an extension of iNEWS, enabling better storytelling on web and mobile devices, managing assignments and resources in an all-in-one integrated solution,” André explains.
MediaCentral | Collaborate is an app in the web-based MediaCentral | Cloud UX. It is also available as an iOS app, and within a panel in Media Composer or within tools which are part of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite, such as Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Photoshop.
Expanding the functions of MediaCentral | Collaborate strengthens story-centric workflows by enabling work outside the boundaries of a story rundown. For example, if you're working within a topic like the World Cup, then you can create all your content in this topic with different assignments. Each assignment has its own virtual container where all your media, edited sequences, graphics notes, and scripts are collated. From the container, completed items can be distributed to their publication points, such as a studio playout device, website, or a social media platform.
“It makes it very easy to just work on the content first, build up the story, and then eventually decide where you want to publish this, and make different versions,” André explains.
In addition to linking media, research, and stories, all graphics, including through Photoshop and After Effects, can also be linked. This access to graphics enables collaboration among all team members.
“There are quite a range of tools that collaborate and allow me to see my task, get notifications, and also change the status,” Roth comments. “I do not have to change the application.”
MediaCentral | Collaborate was designed to suit a multitude of workflows including news, sports, post production, and studio promotion to make it flexible enough for these different types of production needs, and to be able to assign tasks, resources, track progress, communicate, and collaborate all the time.
“We see a lot of customers coming up with great ideas for how to leverage Collaborate in news, of course, but also outside of news,” André says.
“It's so easy to open a promo or a trailer on the iOS app, and be able to just review and approve it,” Wilson says.
Media ingest from anywhere
Further simplifying the ability to ingest media is the new MediaCentral | Acquire web-based scheduling app available in MediaCentral | Cloud UX.
MediaCentral | Acquire can control multiple MediaCentral | Stream ingest devices to bring feeds in from compressed IP sources such as SRT and RTMP. It can also control multiple FastServe | Ingest and FastServe | I/O devices for SDI or Video over IP sources using the SMPTE 2110 protocol. Media is written into Avid NEXIS shared storage servers with vital metadata captured to MediaCentral | Production Management.
In the webinar, Ramzan demonstrated how the MediaCentral | Acquire app gives users the ability to preview feeds prior to ingest, then once ingest starts any users on the MediaCentral system can get instant access to recorded media whether they are working in MediaCentral | Cloud UX or a craft editor such as Media Composer.
André points out several other MediaCentral | Acquire features including being able to log as well as edit immediately in a timeline right from the recording grid, all with the goal of helping you produce and deliver high-quality content to any digital platform faster. “It's skipping steps,” André remarks. “So you get to do your job more easily and faster, especially for repeat tasks.”
The flexibility which MediaCentral | Acquire enhances the efficiency of ingest—another critical part of an integrated end to end workflow—ensuring users working with Avid’s news solutions can get to work quickly to deliver their stories.
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