One of the growing challenges that content creators face – whether they are freelancers or larger production companies – is the need to produce quality content on ever tighter budgets, while also trying to monetise it in an ever more fragmented world of TVs, tablets and smartphones.
As in many other industries, film and TV production is also now carried out across borders, as producers and content creators look further afield for the right talent at the right price to complete projects.
These are all trends that Louis Hernandez, Jr, chairman, president and CEO of Avid Technologies is well aware of, and keen to address. Hernandez’s aim, since becoming CEO of Avid back in February 2013, is to bring content creators closer to content consumers, while removing barriers in the production process by increasing the ability of creative professionals to collaborate.
“In media there are basically two people involved when you get through all the morass,” Hernandez told Digital Studio during a recent interview. “There is the person who has the idea to create content and the person to consume it. All we’re trying to do is bring these two people closer, more powerfully, more efficiently. What’s standing in between is this mess of disjointed, non-standardised, highly proprietary technologies.”
The first task that Hernandez took on when he took over the reigns as CEO was to design a platform that would allow open collaboration between content creators, from musicians to videographers, editors and colour graders.
“We spent the first eight weeks only designing this platform and then we started building as fast as we could. This is probably the biggest change that has happened within Avid, pushing as much as we could to common shared services platforms.”
This platform, which has paved the way for services such as Avid Everywhere and Avid MediaCentral, was designed to address the many challenges faced by the content creation community head on.
Hernandez defines these challenges without hesitation: “In terms of the issues we have been facing as an industry, what we’re seeing around the world is a combination of these business issues that people are adapting to. First, content consumption and content creation is going through the roof. There is so much competition for creating new content that the pressure on the best content is actually higher than ever before.
“That is the most comforting part of what is going on though, because the bigger challenge is that you have to make it available through more channels and devices, which for our clients means more cost.
“You have to optimise the value over a longer period of time in order to cover the increased complexity, you have to be more efficient but you also have to be more secure,” Hernandez adds.
The drive for efficiency is driving a trend of outsourcing, with producers hiring talent for different tasks in various parts of the world in a bid to get the rights skills at the right price.
“The economics of this business are forcing people to work more collaboratively all around the world with the best and brightest in a more efficient way, and that means tools that allow you to collaborate no matter where you are.
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So what we find is all of our clients are dealing with some combination of these challenges, whether or not you are an individual artist or a large media company like Al Jazeera or Disney, they are all dealing with some form of that – and that’s why we came out with Avid Everywhere, along with a couple of other pillars to our strategy,” he says.
“The idea is that now it is a digitised connection between the creative process and consumption, so why don’t we share as many tools as possible to make this connection more efficient and more powerful.”
This is a philosophy that runs through all of Avid’s recent launches and upgrades, including many announcements made during NAB Show in Las Vegas last month. Indeed, during the show, Avid announced numerous innovations on its Avid MediaCentral Platform and its associated modular application suites, which cater to content creators such as musicians and film producers.
These innovations were designed to let everyone, from individual artists and students, creative teams in studios and post-production companies, and the largest media enterprises to more efficiently create and distribute high-quality professional media content.
Avid said that since it launched the Avid MediaCentral Platform at NAB 2014, it plans to roll out new tools and partner integrations that extend capabilities across live sound, music composition, video production, media asset management, and shared storage.
At NAB 2015, the company announced new service innovations for its Artist Suite, Sibelius, Media Suite, Avid Advantage and more. For example, on Artist Suite, the company introduced Avid Artist | DNxIO, which helps video professionals meet the growing demands of high-res video production with best-in-class hardware and Avid’s Media Composer video editing software.
Avid announced plans to open video editing to everyone with Media Composer | First, a free version of the video editing software used by top Hollywood Oscar and Emmy winners.
The company also announced that Pro Tools | First, the free version of its renowned music creation software, is starting to roll out to the more than 70,000 people who pre-registered for the product.
The free versions of Avid’s products are a key part of its strategy, helping to introduce more users to the products and also making it easier for existing users to encourage others to collaborate using Avid tools.
“In the artist suite we announced our first free version of a professional grade tool earlier this year. We opened up the market place and we continue to add to the media in the storage suite as well. The first thing we wanted to clarify was that even if you are an individual artist you have a way to participate. If you are a team or a large media company you are just going to buy more apps versus if you are an individual artist.”
Hernandez stressed that Pro Tools First is not a “cut down version”, although it is limited to three free projects.
“It is not a separate application. It is actually the same engine that the professionals use, we just limited some of its capabilities. You can complete three cloud projects for free, use up to 16 tracks, 21 plug ins, you get a virtual instrument and you can store three projects for free. The reason this is important is that the next generation will be able to use this product without having to pay.
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“Everything in the Artist Suite will have a First version, not just Pro Tools or Media Composer,” Hernandez confirmed.
Avid also announced the addition of cloud collaboration to its platform. As an example, this means that a user in Spain can invite people in New York, Dubai or anywhere else to a session on Pro Tools, and they can maintain control of the session. “It’s as though we’re sitting next to each other,” Hernandez said.
“There’s a video check in ability. Once you’re ready and you’ve rehearsed you’ll be able to go to a studio and make it a professional grade product. It’s just a way for everyone to work together at a much lower cost.”
Once content has been created, users can even look to share or sell it on Avid Marketplace.
The Avid Content Marketplace allows users to post content for sales or for free use. “To post anything here you must sign a licencing agreement where you either share something or you can get paid for your work. The cool thing about this is that anything created off Pro Tools 12 in this example has an automated meditated tagging so that everybody gets paid, and if it somehow shows up on YouTube, we’ll know who was the singer and the guitarist etcetera.
That’s not a choice, it comes with our products automatically. We are just trying to rebalance the unintended consequences that the artistic side is losing out on this new media value chain,” Hernandez says.
“It’s all designed to address those business issues that are shifting the economics to where more is going to how you monetise these assets than the creative process, because it has become so complicated,” Hernandez adds.
“What we are trying to do is fuse these two together digitally so that a lot of things you need to monetise can be done while you’re creating and those budgets go back to the creative professional.”
