Avid Enhances Media Composer Subscription Offering

Avid today announced a new version of Avid Media Composer | Distributed Processing that it said significantly speeds up content production by using adjacent computing resources to help creative teams keep up with the increasing demand for new content.

Media Composer | Distributed Processing lets editors  focus more on their craft by offloading processor-intensive media creation workflow tasks to any available local computers, freeing up their Media Composer edit workstations while removing wasteful downtime from the production process for faster project turnaround. Media Composer | Distributed Processing is included with Media Composer | Enterprise software subscriptions.

Media Composer | Distributed Processing lets users:

• Keep working—not waiting — Keeps editors in the creative zone, so they can continue working in Media Composer and have more time to craft their stories as jobs get completed in the background. They can offload media encoding tasks with support for a variety of camera, video, and audio file formats and codecs.
• Accelerate the entire workflow — Handles a media workflow’s most processor-intensive tasks—including transcode, consolidate, render, mixdown, and export—in a fraction of the time by coordinating dispersed processing resources. Multiple complex jobs can be set up to run in the background at any time—even overnight.
• Monitor systems more easily — Users can track, modify, monitor, prioritize, and filter jobs remotely through the web-based dashboard and new coordinator tools that give teams insight and access to distributed computer networks.
• Turn around content faster — With parallel processing, jobs can be completed faster to meet tight deadlines and the increasing need for multiple versions for streaming platforms. Delivers higher return-on-investment and cost savings to post-production teams by enabling them to complete projects faster with fewer assets.
• Get the most out of existing resources — Comprehensive administrative tools to create logical worker groups, monitor queues, and prioritize jobs. Optimizes available resources by turning Media Composer Mac or PC workstations into distributed processing “workers” when they’re not in use for editing.

Dave Colantuoni, Avid vice president of product management, said: “Film and TV production teams all over the world are being tasked with creating more content faster than ever before to meet audience demand, and we’re excited to introduce processing capabilities that enable Media Composer users to overcome this challenge.

“New features in Media Composer | Distributed Processing give users everything they need to accelerate workflows by reducing delays that result from running processor-intensive tasks, helping teams to work smarter, not harder.”