Avid Takes Story Development To The Cloud

Interplay Sphere, a new cloud-based program that allows broadcast news employees to acquire, access, edit and complete stories from any location, was among the dozen product innovations Avid disclosed in Las Vegas Sunday, timed to NAB.

“Interplay Sphere is about delivering new capabilities that didn’t exist … and it’s allowing our customers to do things that they hadn’t thought about,” said Chris Gahagan, SVP of product solutions. “It’s about bringing the journalist or the media creator to where the action is, letting the story be created where the story is actually happening, but at the same time allowing complete access to what they have back in the newsroom.”

Users would have access to Avid’s Media Composer and NewsCutter video editing software, and through the Internet, can edit footage shot on location along with any media in the newsroom and then upload finished stories back to the newsroom to go to air.

Dana Ruzicka, VP of segment and product marketing, said automating media processing could be done back in the newsroom through Interplay Sphere, and as a journalist edits a story, the footage is uploaded back to the station. A journalist can potentially access another reporter’s footage through Interplay Sphere, even if he is out in the field as well.

That’s certainly some heavy content to entrust across public networks, but Gahagan isn’t concerned about any bottleneck issues interfering with the quality of Interplay Sphere’s service, because the rendering is done in the newsroom itself. Interplay Sphere is also self-regulated, adjusting the connection process to the bandwidth levels a journalist may access in real time.

Other announcement highlights Sunday included news of a multiplatform distribution solution for Web content management systems, online video platforms and social media, using Interplay and iNEWS functionality and orchestrating data flow through the creation and transcoding processes.

Avid also announced three new server and storage products — the latest AirSpeed 5000 video server, the new Avid ISIS 2000 for near-line storage and the fourth version of the Avid ISIS 7000.

Among the AirSpeed highlights is new codec flexibility with Avid digital nonlinear extensive high-definition playback included in the HD versions.

The ISIS 2000 works with Interplay to let users search, browse access and manage media and extend the media library, all while augmenting real-time editorial production.

The ISIS 7000’s big change is its storage capacity, twice the previous version, thanks to a new storage blade.

Avid also announced enhancements to its Motion Graphics capabilities that include a new real-time 2D and 3D rendering engine.

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