Avid Previews New Vision for Pro Tools at NAB 2014 — Cloud Collaboration, Monetization, and Much More

The future is looking cloudy again to Pro Tools users – but that may be a good thing this time.

Will “Avid Everywhere” fundamentally change the way Pro Tools users work?

Get your brain ready, because there’s a lot coming up from Avid to get your head around. With the opening of NAB 2014, the company has unveiled a major reorganization of all of its existing hardware and software product lines based on their new MediaCentral Platform – a “standardized foundation that connects media creators and distributors together, regardless of who makes the tools they use.”

The objective is to provide an integrated system with extremely high new levels of flexibility. Users will be able to choose their solutions, then more easily customize and scale complete end-to-end workflows.

On top of that is a new uber-philosophy/manifesto dubbed Avid Everywhere, a unifying strategic vision for its audio, broadcast/media, and video product lines. Generally speaking, the idea is to “connect creative professionals and media organizations with their audiences in more powerful, efficient, collaborative, and profitable ways.”

Avid specified different approaches for accomplishing that goal for each vertical, but specific to audio it will allow the artists and audio professionals that use Pro Tools to collaborate via the cloud; monetize content via an interactive online audio marketplace; manage, track, and document assets using an open, universal metadata schema; and store and archive work locally or in the cloud.

We’ll pass on all of Avid’s upcoming upgrades to the Pro Tools platform – which are currently being previewed at NAB and will arrive at an as-yet unspecified point in the future – below and verbatim.

But in a nutshell, the long list of innovations is intended to bring Pro Tools users, their clients, and customers together in many new dimensions. The goal appears to be one of taking Pro Tools from far beyond the recording/mixing/editing platform that it primarily is today, and evolving it to an all-in-one everything for its users  — a convergent solution for far more effective collaboration during the creation process, all the way to an efficient marketplace where their content can be bought, sold and licensed.

Will it succeed in redefining not only Pro Tools, but Avid along with it? Only time will tell – the promises are big and if delivered well, could significantly evolve the way music and sound creators work – before, during and after the project.

The details released by Avid are extensive – they follow here in full:

Through a series of presentations at NAB, Avid will preview several key technological innovations for Pro Tools audio software, which will enable artists, producers, engineers, sound designers, and remixers to:

Collaborate via the cloud — To enable music and audio professionals to collaborate together everywhere, Avid announced plans to add cloud-based collaboration workflows to Pro Tools. Musicians, producers, mixers and other contributors will be able to work together on the same music session or soundtrack, in real-time or offline, no matter where they are.

With track-based collaboration Pro Tools users will be able to:

• Post sessions to cloud storage and invite others to collaborate
• Work on the same session at the same time or offline, and share updates directly within Pro Tools
• Record, edit, and mix tracks that will be pushed to all other collaborators upon completion
• Automatically keep track of all contributions and changes, as files are automatically tagged with rich metadata

With streaming capabilities, users will be able to:

• Securely stream mixes to an iOS device for real-time review and approval
• Sync collaborators’ Pro Tools sessions together to work on audio for video projects, such as remote ADR or voiceover sessions
• Stream audio across synched Pro Tools sessions

Securely share and archive work locally or in the cloud — To ensure that users can maintain access and provide collaborators access to all parts of their projects—even on systems that don’t have the same plug-ins—Avid is developing the PXF archival. This format will enable Pro Tools sessions to be exported with rich metadata and effects “frozen” into the media so that projects can be accessed and played further down the line, even if technologies change or are unavailable, no matter how far out in the future users re-access them.

Monetize content through an online marketplace — Content creators will be able to connect and collaborate with other media professionals, as well as connect with consumers, through a public marketplace, enabling them to share and monetize media, with all rights managed and delivery secured across the environment. Additionally, studios and media companies will be able to set up private marketplaces that enable collaboration and streamline production.

Unlike social music sites that simply allow music sharing and promotion, the audio marketplace will help artists forge more meaningful connections with the entire audio community, enabling them to connect with other media professionals and creators to share, collaborate, enhance, promote, and sell their work, publicly or privately.

The new marketplace will allow audio professionals to:

• Publish session files, multichannel stems, and stereo mixdowns directly from Pro Tools for license in the public marketplace
• Gain exposure and opportunities to make money by connecting with media professionals looking to license music and sound assets
• Quickly find professional-quality content in the style and formats they need, as all files will contain rich, searchable metadata
• Rate and provide comments for media assets in the marketplace to help others in the community make more informed purchasing decisions
• Buy and sell music and audio content with peace of mind, as all rights will be managed and protected across the marketplace
• Create a private marketplace for media enterprise, making it possible to sell media assets, and control to whom they are available, through a storefront hosted in Avid’s marketplace
• Search for and purchase marketplace content and audio plug-ins directly from within Pro Tools—with no application restart required after installation

Manage content using a new metadata schema — A new universal open metadata schema will enable users to manage, protect, and track every single media asset created and edited across the entire production and media value chain, from content creation through consumption. The metadata schema will be integrated into Pro Tools, and document the roles of all creative contributors, as well as manage, protect, and track how the media performs in the marketplace.

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