Omneon, Marquis Medway to Support Apple, Avid Workflows

Omneon announced that the enhanced integration of its MediaGrid active storage system with Marquis Broadcast’s Medway media highway software now allows for the seamless migration of edit timelines between Apple Final Cut Pro and Avid editors. With the ability to migrate and recompose a Final Cut Pro timeline as an Avid sequence, production facilities can leverage both of these editing solutions more purposefully across their operations, reducing costs and eliminating workflow bottlenecks.

The Omneon MediaGrid active storage system delivers centralized content storage that is scalable in capacity, bandwidth, and media processing power and supports edit-in-place for both Apple Final Cut Pro and Avid Media Composer and Newscutter editors. Medway from Marquis is a media transfer and format conversion tool that creates a unified working environment for broadcast ingest and transmission servers and post-production editing systems. The close integration of the MediaGrid system and Medway also enables the off-loading of export and conform processes for both Final Cut Pro and Avid editing environments and gives users drag-and-drop or single-click control over the migration of sequences from Apple to Avid edit systems.

In a typical production setting, the pairing of Omneon and Marquis technologies allows staff to use Final Cut Pro on their workstations to create cuts-only edits, then, using a simple menu option, transfer that edit timeline to a craft editor working with Avid. Medway recomposes and rewraps the timeline and source clips for the Avid environment. In doing so, the application includes “handles” on either end of each clip—a few seconds before the in-point and after the out-point—to give the craft editor more flexibility during final edit.

While giving production facilities greater flexibility in creating efficient workflows, Medway’s support for Avid edit-in-place on the MediaGrid system also speeds finishing of the completed edit. When the edit is completed, Medway can offload conforming of the final product. The Marquis application frees up the editor for the next project even as individual clips are being pulled from the MediaGrid system, flattened into a new file, and incorporated into an open MXF file that is ready for playout.