Avid was Everywhere at IBC

Avid Marketplace - part of the company's connectivity partner platform.

Avid used Amsterdam to showcase its Avid Everywhere platform, with an array of new technologies and products, as well as new partners.

The Avid Everywhere suite of announcements included the usual suspects of Pro Tools and Media Composer but they were a small part of the overall suite of tools Avid had to show.

The new cloud solutions included the Nexis high density storage solutions. Nexis E5 is designed for high density and realtime editorial collaboration, with 50 GbE and up to 480TB of storage per engine. It can scale up to 1.5 petabytes of storage and 9.6GBps bandwidth, enough for 500 DNxHR 4K streams with 300 connected clients in a compact package.

Nexis High Availability uses redundancy to maximize reliability.

Both are compatible with a wide variety of media creation tools including Premiere, Edius, and Final Cut Pro as well as Avid's own Media Composer, and allow media creation teams to share their assets quickly and easily.

Nexis storage solutions are virtualized, so that teams can reconfigure them as needed without disrupting work. Nexis is also designed to be scalable, allowing customers to invest in only what they need, and invest in additional features when they need them.

Avid also embraced video over IP in its Media Central Platform, with demos showcasing tools for ingest, playout, inserting graphics and monitoring, as well as editing, all over IP and supporting formats including UHD.

Avid also showcased a sports-oriented platform with a suite of tools designed around the needs for sports production (ie mobile productions based in trucks). These solutions were based on the Avid MediaCentral Platform, enabling the production studios to configure solutions around their needs and budget, and adapt them as their needs change.

The usual suspects got some attention also; Avid had an update for Pro Tools to show, with new features like clip effects and layered editing to speed up mixing workflows.

Along with announcing a suite of new products and partners, Avid was also touting several partners who are using Avid's new platforms already, such as German broacaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR). NDR used Avid technologies to create a virtual studio system build around products from the Avid suite of tools.

Another big win for Avid was the NEP Group, which used Avid solutions for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio. In addition to using Avid broadcast technologies, NEP used an interesting-sounding 3-camera augmented reality system that allowed directors to cut from camera to camera without interrupting their graphics.

Avid is also, of course, a member of the AIMS Alliance, which means it is taking the refreshing approach of striving to establish standards to foster interoperability among products from a variety of vendors, rather than simply attempting to lock customers into Avid solutions. To this end, the company was also promoting new Avid Alliance Partners including StorageDNA, Glookast, and FilmLight among others via its MediaCentral Platform.