GBH Transforms Collaborative Workflows With Avid Enterprise Solutions

Avid has an expanded relationship with GBH (WGBH Boston) and The OutPost, its audio and post-production finishing facility. The continued relationship with GBH, the largest content creator for public media in America, including PBS, NPR and PRX, features the addition of a second Avid S6 to The OutPost facilities, which mixes programs for PBS programs including Frontline, Nova and American Experience.

GBH is evolving the infrastructure of The OutPost’s three mix theatres, where Pro Tools is the platform of choice for audio mixing engineers. Adding a second Avid S6 brings compatibility between rooms and provides The OutPost mixing engineers with powerful, feature-rich mixing platform for Pro Tools, while providing user friendly ergonomics and rich visual feedback of automation and audio waveforms to further streamline mixing workflows.

The Avid S6 has become the industry standard for audio post production mixing facilities. As budgets and mix schedules get reduced, engineers are asked to deliver in more formats like Atmos while mixing larger Pro Tools sessions and demand the powerful automation and track management features of S6 which have become indispensable in meeting tight post production deadlines.

Avid and GBH Through the Pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, GBH transitioned to Avid’s enterprise software subscription for its Media Composer, MediaCentral and Pro Tools solutions, providing them with the flexibility and scalability to meet the challenges at the time. GBH was able to quickly move 75 edit suites offsite to provide their teams with remote access to their on-prem machines and storage. GBH production teams collaborated virtually in edit suites and mixing rooms, which included 45 Media Composer suites, four Symphony video color grading suites, three sound mixing rooms featuring Pro Tools and an Avid S6 Control Surface.

“While the pandemic accelerated the broadcast and production industry’s adoption of new virtual workflows, Avid has ensured that customers experience zero downtime with quick access to editing suites and storage for seamless collaboration and immediate innovation,” said Tom Cordiner, Avid chief revenue officer. “GBH is a great example showcasing how broadcast, production and editing teams are harnessing the power of the cloud to derive even more value from their content.”

GBH also upgraded its Avid storage capacity to one and a half petabytes, implementing various levels of Avid | NEXIS F-Series tiered storage with Avid | NEXIS VFS virtual file system and Avid NEXIS | Flex Subscription. These storage solutions provided GBH productions teams with full interoperability between Media Composer and other editing platforms to collaborate from anywhere at any time.

“Avid has played a huge role in helping us on our mission to transition towards cloud-based editing and production workflows, which was greatly accelerated by the pandemic,” said Tim Mangini, GBH Production Group senior director of production technology. “Our teams depend not only on streamlined, intuitive and collaborative workflows, but also integration with our other tools, which Avid excels at. They provide the levels of integration and customization we need to get the most value out of our productions.”

Avid is attending NAB Show (April 16-19 at the Las Vegas Convention Center) in Booth N1221.