POST PRODUCTION
Avid – Set the Controls for the Heart of the Cloud Recently in Australia, Paul Thompson, Avid’s Director of Strategic Solutions sat down with Phil Sandberg to talk MediaCentral and the Cloud. C+T: Your visit comes on the heels of NAB. For those unable to attend, what were the Avid highlights? “We made quite a few announcements at NAB. The biggest one is around MediaCentral and our next generation of that, which we’re calling MediaCentral Cloud UX. And with that, we’re kind of moving into the next development of our platform strategy. So, a few years ago we had kind of a bunch of products that didn’t really work well together. They were all kind of built on an individual basis. We took that and took those products, took the best bits and moved them into a platform which we called MediaCentral. And MediaCentral is kind of positioned as almost like an operating system for the media enterprise. And, that has been deploying around the world very successfully. The next step of MediaCentral is to move it from being an on-premise and something that is deployable in a private data centre but really to move it to the public cloud as well. “There’s a couple of underlying principles that we’re trying to follow. One is commercial, so making sure that from a customer perspective they have the choice of deploying on a capex basis or deploying on an opex basis. Second is really technical, so from a deployment perspective they can deploy as much on prem, in the traditional way, as the business wants and needs, but also be able to deploy in a cloud basis as much or as little as the business needs. “We actually see a majority of our customers wanting to adopt a hybrid strategy, so use our existing infrastructure on site maybe to kind of depreciate that and to get the 24x7 use from that, but then to go to the cloud for a couple of reasons. The first reason being to use services that are only available in the cloud, like artificial intelligence and things like that. Collaboration becomes a lot easier when you’re in the cloud. “So, one of the things we launched at NAB was what we call Shared Library, which is really another name for collaboration between all those different production silos that exist in organisations. So, be they geographic ones or teams within one facility, wouldn’t it be nice to have the capability that whatever production group or whatever they’re producing, anyone in the enterprise can see what’s being produced and can grab it, re-use it, use it to enrich their story or their production, and then easily share that finished product as well. That manifests itself by having lots of content sitting within MediaCentral’s on premise in those individual sites, but then pushing to a global or a central or a shared library in the cloud so people can access that shared library from anywhere and they can pull the assets they need across the business as they need it. So that’s the first thing. “The second aspect of going to the cloud is to use it to drive more efficiency within the existing business. So being able to remove the duplication, so if multiple sites are doing the same type of thing, they can move that workflow perhaps to the cloud and reduce their actual onsite costs as well.” You describe it as an operating system, but it’s also like an ecosystem?
POST PRODUCTION
“Right. The operating system aspect is from a user perspective, in the same ways we’ve all got a phone with an operating system on it, we’ve all got different applications that we use to do whatever it was we were actually doing in that hour of the day. You could think of MediaCentral UX as a browser-based user experience, but within that user experience, that browser, you can basically have whatever applications that you need to do what you need to do at that moment in time. Perhaps you’re editing or perhaps you’re logging or perhaps you’re publishing to social media. The users, if you go around the enterprise, will all have the same kind of look and feel, but you’ll see kind of different applications running in their screen, depending on what particular thing they’re doing at that particular moment of the day.
30
“In terms of ecosystem, what we want to make sure is that the platform is used in an open a way as possible, so every customer has a variety of different suppliers and systems and technologies and some legacy, some new, whatever. One of the things we’re sharing with MediaCentral is those Avid apps to edit, to browse and to do various things, but there’s also a number of apps that are from our partners, our third-party partners. And there’s apps ranging – kind of everything, right across the workflow from Ingest to management of social news feeds right through to ingesting sports statistics right through to the publish aspect of publishing out to the social networks and to other platforms. It’s a fundamental premise of MediaCentral to make it open, and we see multiple ecosystems. “An ecosystem like news, as an example, we’ve done a lot of work just understanding what, for instance, the news ecosystem looks like today
compared to five years ago. One of the things especially in news is around the story-centric approach, rather than driving towards the 6 O’Clock news. It’s about watching that story emerge. So, maybe the story breaks on Twitter. Is that a real story? Okay, well let’s use the social research tools to understand if it is real or if it’s fake news. As that story develops, first get that breaking story out as quickly, as efficiently as possible to whatever the consumer base is that the customer is servicing. Is it just social? Is it video? Is it TV? Is it web? Is it everything? Print even. Then use the MediaCentral tools to actually work with that story during the day. How is that story evolving? Does it need some archive material added into it? If so, let’s use the search tools to actually find that archive. Maybe not in my physical facility but maybe in my sister or brother’s facility across the geo. How can I as a journalist find that content more easily? “That’s kind of where we start thinking about Cognitive Services and artificial intelligence and if we sent a news crew out to shoot some material on site, wouldn’t it be kind of nice if that materials came into the MediaCentral platform, if it was automatically enriched with metadata where all the things that were spoken about were all of a sudden available as metadata, so you can kind of search on that? Wouldn’t it be nice if all the people appearing in that piece of video were automatically tagged and recognised? So, using the power of the cloud, the power of AI to make it easier to make the story better and richer and more engaging. The cloud component of MediaCentral is in partnership with Microsoft. Is that the same for the AI? “We’re using Azure Cognitive Services. If we take a video clip today, we pass it up to the cloud, the AI services run on it and we grab the metadata back and the metadata is handled as a strata within the MediaCentral platform. Then the user can just go and, using a very simple search bar, they can search on the face, type, text, whatever, even what appears as a name badge, the AI system will pick that up and transcribe that. “We launched a product bundle called Avid AI, which is a combination of Microsoft’s Azure’s AI, their Cognitive Services, but also our own Illuminate technology, which is very much about phonetic searching, so rather than having to get the spelling correct of something you can basically type in roughly what it sounds like and the phonetic search capability will actually be able to pull back the most positive likelihood of the pieces of media that match that criteria, so it’s tremendously powerful. Another aspect of that technology is a QA tool which we’re calling Illuminate, which is all about caption QA, being able to use that to check the quality of the captions and subtitles and their alignment with the actual spoken word and the actual quality of the captions compared to the actual video itself.” There were some new announcements around editing as well? “So, we launched our Avid On Demand portfolio, which has several aspects to it; Shared Library, we talked about earlier, bringing together the multiple geographic sites with a central library, having that available on demand or as a burst capacity. The second is Editorial Management On Demand, so making almost like remote production available on an on-demand basis. Those will launch later in 2018. It’s very exciting because I think it really moves forward the whole kind of thinking of how production will changed powered by the cloud. It’s becoming more possible, more commercially attractive to be able to shoot a bunch of material on camera in the field and either upload proxy or upload full res depending on your connectivity into the cloud and what is in the cloud. Then, with Editorial Management, be able to edit it in the cloud and then, depending on where you’re distributing it to. If you’re going social today you could basically keep it in the cloud and publish straight to those cloud-centric platforms, or you could push it back on prem and do some further craft work with it or take it to broadcast or whatever. So, it’s going to be an interesting 2018 I think.” Visit www.ambertech.com.au and www.avid.com