It’s interesting to see that in spite of a lot of press, the Avid Everywhere concept still results in confusion. They’ve certainly been enunciating it since last year, with a full roll-out at NAB this past April. For whatever reason, Avid Everywhere seems to be lumped together with Adobe Anywhere in the minds of many. Maybe it’s the similarity of names or it’s that they both have a cloud component, but they aren’t the same thing. Avid Everywhere is a corporate vision, while Adobe Anywhere is a specific product (more on that later).
Vision and strategy
Avid Technology is a company with a diverse range of hardware and software products, covering content creation (video, audio, graphics, news), asset management, audio/video hardware i/o, consoles and control surfaces, storage and servers. In an effort to consolidate and rebrand a wide-ranging set of offerings, Avid has repackaged these existing (and future) products under the banner of Avid Everywhere. This is a marketing strategy designed to convey the message that whatever your media needs might be, Avid has a product or service to satisfy that need. This is coupled to a community of users that can benefit from their common use of Avid products.
This vision positions Avid’s products as a “platform”, in the same way that Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, Android, Apple hardware and PC hardware are all platforms. Within this platform concept, the products become stratified into product tiers or “suites”. Bear in mind that “suite” really refers to a group of products and not specifically a collection of hardware or software that you purchase as a single unit. The base layer of this platform contains the various software hooks that tie the products together – for example, APIs required to use Media Composer software with Interplay asset management or in an ISIS SAN environment. This is called the Avid MediaCentral Platform.
On top of this sits the Storage Suite, which consists of the various Avid storage solutions, such as ISIS, along with news play-out servers. The next tier is the Media Suite, which encompasses the Interplay asset management and iNews newsroom products. In the transition to the Avid Everywhere strategy, you’ll see a lot of references on Avid’s website and in their marketing literature to “formerly Interplay ___”. That’s because Avid is in the process of rebranding these products into something with a “Media ___” name.
Most users who are editing and audio professionals will mainly associate Avid with the Artist Suite tier. This is the layer of content creation tools, including Media Composer, Pro Tools, Sibelius and the control surfaces that came out of Digidesign and Euphonix, including the Artist panels. If you are a single user of Media Composer, Pro Tools or Sibelius and own no other Avid infrastructure, like ISIS or Interplay, then the entire Avid Everywhere media platform doesn’t touch you very much for now.
The top layer of the platform chart is MediaCentral | UX, which was formerly known as Interplay Central. This is a web front-end that allows you to browse, log and notate Interplay assets from a desktop computer, laptop or mobile device. Although the current iteration is targeted at news production, the concept is story-centric and could provide functionality in other arenas, such as drama and reality series production.
Surrounding the entire structure are support services (tech support and professional integration services) plus a private and public marketplace. Media Composer software has included a Marketplace menu item for a few versions. Until now, this has been a web portal to buy plug-ins and stock footage. The updated vision for this is more along the lines of services like SoundCloud, Adobe’s Behance service or the files section of Creative Cloud. For example, let’s say you are a composer that uses Pro Tools. You create licensable music tracks and post them to the Marketplace. Other users can browse the Marketplace and find your tracks, complete with licensing and payment arrangements. To make this work, the Avid MediaCentral Platform includes things like proper security to enable such transactions.
All clouds are not the same
I started this post with the comment that I feel many editors confuse Adobe Anywhere and Avid Everywhere. I believe that’s because they mistakenly interpret Avid Everywhere as the specific version of the Media Composer product that enables remote-access editing. As I’ve explained above, Everywhere is a concept and vision, not a product. That specific Media Composer product (formerly Interplay Sphere) is now branded as Media Composer | Cloud. As a product, it most closely approximates Adobe Anywhere, but there are key differences.
Adobe Anywhere is a system that requires a centralized server and storage. Any computer with Premiere Pro CC or CC 2014 can remotely access the assets on this system, which streams proxy media back to that computer. All the “heavy lifting” is done at the central site and the editor’s Premiere Pro is effectively working only as a local front-end. The operation does not allow hybrid editing with a combination of local and remote assets. All local assets have to be uploaded to the server and then streamed back to the editor. That’s because Anywhere manages the assets for multiple editors during collaborative workflows and handles project versioning. If you are working on an Anywhere production, you always have to be connected to the network.
In contrast, Media Composer | Cloud is primarily a plug-in that works with an otherwise standard version of the Media Composer software. In order for it to function, the “home base” facility must have an appropriate Interplay/ISIS infrastructure so that Media Composer | Cloud can talk to it. In Avid marketing parlance “you’ve got to get on the platform” for some of these things to work.
Media Composer | Cloud permits hybrid editing. For example, a news videographer in the field can be editing at the proverbial Starbucks using local assets. Maybe part of the story requires access to past b-roll footage that lives back at the station on its newsroom storage. Through Media Composer | Cloud and Interplay, the videographer can access those files as proxies and integrate them into the piece. Meanwhile, local assets can be uploaded back to the station. When the piece is cut, a “publish” command (an AAF of the sequence) goes back to the station for quick turnaround to air. Media Composer | Cloud, by its nature, doesn’t require continuous connection, so editing can continue during transit, such as in a vehicle.
While not everything about Avid Everywhere has been fully implemented, yet, it certainly is an aggressive strategy. It is an attempt to move the company as a whole into areas beyond just editing software, while still allowing users and owners to leverage their Avid assets into other opportunities.
©2014 Oliver Peters
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