BURLINGTON, Mass.—Avid will feature its new Avid Content Core at NAB Show New York, Oct. 22-23 at the Javits Center in New York.

The cloud-based production and content data platform, introduced last month at IBC2025 in Amsterdam, will be shown alongside Avid’s new NEXIS Remote cloud storage capability, which enables facility-grade editing from anywhere. The company will also feature new product enhancements and expanded partner integrations that introduce artificial intelligence, automation and streaming tools directly into Avid workflows, the company said.

“Avid Content Core marks a transformational step forward for the media industry, bringing content creation, management and value realization together into a single, cloud-native platform,” CEO Avid Wellford Dillard said. “By unifying these capabilities, we’re helping media organizations unleash creativity, collaborate seamlessly across different locations, maximize the return on their content and pivot faster to new business models.”

The new platform equips the media and entertainment industry to move beyond fragmented systems by treating media assets as intelligent, connected data, Avid said. From global broadcasters and newsrooms to major studios and post-production facilities, Avid Content Core accelerates output, streamlines operations, boosts return on investment (ROI), reduces total cost of ownership (TCO) and opens opportunities for growth, the company said.

Designed to transcend the limitations of media asset management systems, Avid Content Core is a content data platform that brings ingest, search, orchestration and asset intelligence into a single, cloud-native platform.

Accessible from anywhere via browser-based tools, the platform processes media assets as interconnected, actionable data rather than as isolated files. Avid Content Core enables AI-powered search and recommendations. Each media asset gets a unique fingerprint that lets teams working within the Avid ecosystem to authenticate provenance, track usage and ultimately measure ROI, the company said.

At NAB Show New York, the company will also launch Avid NEXIS Remote, which brings facility-grade editing performance to distributed teams. Now available for cloud deployment, Avid NEXIS Remote allows Media Composer users to connect directly to Avid NEXIS storage in the cloud for real-time, high-resolution editing workflows, the company said.

With secure smart caching and seamless integration across Avid, Adobe, and other tools, Avid NEXIS Remote enables production teams to work from anywhere, edit directly in Media Composer and Pro Tools with no proxy round-tripping and optimize cost and flexibility with elastic cloud storage, Avid said.

While the cloud version of Avid NEXIS Remote is available this month, support for Avid NEXIS F-Series will be launched next year.

The company said it will also highlight a range of integrated solutions and partner demos, including:

• Wolftech News and MediaCentral integration: Story-centric newsroom planning, creation, and publishing now brought together in a single user interface.
• Stream IO: Flexible ingest, loop recording and playout solution for live and fast-turnaround workflows—now with synchronized multicamera ingest and enhanced bulk export.
• Media Composer panels: Featuring AI integrations from Quickture (transcription and sequence creation), Flawless (dialog editing), Acclaim Audio (leveling and cleanup), and Streamwell (low-latency live streaming and collaboration).

See Avid at NAB Show New York booth 547.

More information is available on the company’s website.

LOS ANGELES—Sony Music Publishing’s Extreme Music has formed a strategic alliance with Avid to launch production music that integrates its catalog directly into Avid Media Composer video editing software.

Extreme’s music panel allows users to search, demo and license music across one comprehensive project, the company said.

“Extreme Music has always taken an unconventional approach in bringing opportunities to creators,” said Russell Emanuel, co-founder, president and CEO of Extreme Music. “Alongside Avid, we are putting the strength of our entire catalog more easily into the hands of the editor community, propelling storytellers everywhere to sonically craft with the speed, flexibility and expertise they need to bring their visions to life.”

Extreme has collaborated with such artists as Hans Zimmer, Snoop Dogg, Quincy Jones, Deadmau5, Atticus Ross and Sir George Martin to elevate production music to the level of commercial projects. The new panel smooths traditional licensing hurdles, it said.

Key panel features include access to Extreme Music’s library, intuitive search and match, integrate workflow with Media Composer, edit-ready audio and global entry, it said.

“By embedding Extreme’s unparalleled catalog into our trustworthy platform, we are united in the mission to inspire the next generation of creators in the industry and beyond,” said Guillaume Aubuchon, senior director of product management at Avid. “Our users represent the cultural landscape of music and alongside Extreme’s A-List roster of talent, we are doubling down on our commitment to provide emerging and established creators with a highly curated goldmine of world-class tracks.”

Download the Extreme Music Panel.

More information is available on the Extreme Music and Avid websites.

BURLINGTON, Mass.—Avid today announced an extended agreement with Amazon MGM Studios to integrate Avid’s Media Composer and Avid NEXIS on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The new integration enables the studio’s customers to deploy Avid’s editing and storage solutions via the cloud to fit their specific production needs, Avid said.

Amazon MGM Studios and Avid began a strategic collaboration three years ago that will continue as the companies explore ways to integrate other Avid tools via the cloud. The launch of the Amazon MGM Studios integrations follows the unveiling of the Avid on AWS production framework at NAB Show 2025.

“Amazon MGM Studios’ continued relationship with Avid underscores our confidence in the role Avid NEXIS and Avid Media Composer play in the cloud-powered post-production future,” said Raf Soltanovich, VP of Technology, Prime Video & Amazon MGM Studios. “Today, through the Studio’s own offering with AWS, we can deploy Avid NEXIS to our productions around the world in minutes, which helps us ensure we have best-in-class tools to support our productions.”

Amazon MGM Studios is driving a cloud-first vision for the industry that enhances global collaboration, the companies said. The deployment of Avid tools in AWS empowers distributed creative teams, accelerating turnaround times while cutting complexity through flexible, software-defined workflows.

The collaboration strengthens agility and efficiencies through cloud automation in AWS, enabling new editorial environments to be launched globally within minutes, the companies said.

This agility was demonstrated with a recent feature shooting in India, running dailies in Mumbai and completing editorial in London and Spain. This flexibility enables seamless editorial changes during production while supporting creative flexibility and international collaboration. By leveraging this technology, production teams can maintain workflow continuity across borders, adapting swiftly to evolving creative customer needs.

“We are meeting the pent-up demand of enterprise-class customers for a secure, scalable, and high-performance post-production solution on AWS,” said Wellford Dillard, CEO at Avid. “Amazon MGM Studios’ integration of Avid Media Composer and Avid NEXIS not only shows the critical role our technology continues to play in media production workflows, it also proves that cloud-native post-production is empowering successful creators everywhere, today.”

LOS ANGELES—Editing a documentary requires editors who are organized and who have iron-clad patience to search through and review hours upon hours of footage.

But for a show like “Deadliest Catch,” on which I’ve been a picture editor for the last 14 seasons, these talents are stretched to the limit. Up to 47,000 hours of footage is captured for each season of the show and all those rushes—which include footage from shoulder-mounted cameras shot by camera operators/producers who are on deck with the crab fishermen, as well as multiple fly-on-the-wall mounted cameras from each boat—need to be condensed down into just over 20 hours of finished programming. 

“Deadliest Catch” is the Discovery Channel’s high-octane series that documents fishing vessels in the Bering Sea during Alaskan king crab and snow crab fishing season, which is considered one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. The show has been a fan favorite throughout each of its 300+ episodes in 19 seasons, the latest of which I was honored to be nominated for an Emmy Award.

Rushes Come in 'Waves'
In my work on this show, I work exclusively with Avid Media Composer editing software to turn the hours of footage that make “Deadliest Catch” the suspense-filled show that it is. I work with approximately 10 other editors and together we’re responsible for crafting the daring stories of life on the fishing boats. 

For “Deadliest Catch,” footage comes in waves (pun intended) because the boats are on remote parts of the Bering Sea for weeks or months at a time. That means we’ll be editing earlier episodes of a season while the season is still being documented and footage is still being shipped back as we only get the rushes once the camera operator/producers come ashore.

The unpredictable nature of the job and the delay in receiving rushes means changes need to be made to episodes already in the edit­—the death of Captain Phil Harris late in season six for example. An unexpected event that happened in the middle of a stint at sea, we were told that we’d soon be receiving footage of his death. We went back to previous episodes to line up what was coming. It made us look at older rushes, considering using things that before his death seemed unimportant but afterwards felt significant. 

Editing Flexibility
In any season we use a lot of different features that help us turn the huge amounts of footage into the episodes that you see on TV. While I edit, I’ll mark up clips in our edit bins with locators that do a few things; reminding us to request other angles of something that happened on board or flag something as a good shot that I might want to use later. 

As a team of editors, we also narrow down bins to only show unreferenced clips to our advantage. Seeing only clips that haven’t already been used means we don’t accidentally double up on musical cues in any season. 

I’ve had the pleasure of working on “Deadliest Catch” for so long and I love seeing how the stories have continued to engage audiences with each season; not only that but I’ve also been lucky enough to have already received an Emmy for my work on the show. But none of that would be possible without the incredible job that the whole production team does bringing us this mountain of footage from which to craft these stories. 

For more information visit www.avid.com. 

Virtual production is the cutting-edge of modern film and video creation, and a strong source of job growth within the entertainment industry. Mindful of these facts, DeSales University of Center Valley, PA, is building its own virtual production studio (VP Studio) in its Labuda Center for the Performing Arts.

The new studio, which is currently operating at an off-campus location, is built around an AOTO Electronics high-performance LED screen, which covers two sides of a corner wall. The video wall serves as a high-resolution greenscreen replacement for in-studio video productions, supporting interaction between human actors and computer-generated characters, props, and environments.

“Virtual production in this format relates to live action performers acting in front of an LED screen,” explained Karen Ruggles, associate professor of computer science at DeSales University and the visionary who led the systems design and integration team for this project. “On the LED screen is a photorealistic world constructed by computer science/digital art students. The final product is captured by a physical camera navigated by our TV/Film students.”

DeSales University and its Performing Arts Department built the VP Studio in an effort to "stay ahead of the curve when it comes to technology in the TV/film industry,” said Stephen Furry, the virtual production supervisor in charge of the new facility. He is also a 2001 DeSales University graduate and video production pro whose credits include Star Trek: Picard and The Mandalorian. “Virtual production is becoming commonplace in motion picture and television production.”

Moving (and Non-Moving) Parts
The heart of DeSales’ VP Studio is its LED video wall. It is composed of 96 AOTO Electronics RM series LED display panels (2.31 mm pixel pitch) assembled into two 13x10-foot sections that join at a 90-degree corner within the studio. The wall’s full-motion visuals are assembled on a computer known as the "Primary Operator" within the VP Studio’s control room, which is loaded with Epic Games' Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) software. “The Primary Operator also sends the high-resolution worlds processed by its GPUs to the LED wall,” Furry said.

A Mo-Sys StarTracker camera tracking system communicates with UE5, telling the software where the on-set physical camera is in relation to the world displayed on the video wall. “To record the performances, we use the Sony FS7 4K camera with prime lenses," Furry added. "The camera is mounted on a mini-jib arm with a remote head for easier adjustment of the camera positioning and flexible camera moves.”

To light performers and sets built in front of the LED video wall, the VP Studio uses LED lighting fixtures from Aputure. “Their Nova 600c and 300c series fixtures are RGB LED units that provide a wide range of color with built-in gels and lighting effects, and can be controlled through DMX to emulate lighting consistent with the virtual lighting within the worlds,” Furry explained.

he VP Studio’s camera tracking system is connected to the Primary Operator via UE5 plug-ins such as Live Link. The actors in front of the Sony camera can be shot as is, or they can don motion capture suits so their actions can be used to animate digital characters stored within the system. "We can create video games with characters,” explained Anne Lewis, division head of performing arts at DeSales University. “We can also capture dance on film, while being anywhere in the world.”

Whatever project is being produced, the Primary Operator renders the full motion backdrops in real time and sends them to the AOTA video wall. “From there, it’s like a normal film shot on location, except that the location is a completely digital world that my students can customize without traveling outside of the studio,” Ruggles said. “Furthermore, I can load up any kind of weather or time of day that I want and keep it there for hours—and then reload it up again tomorrow if we need to reshoot.”

Currently, DeSales University is storing all of its virtual worlds on the Primary Operator for easy access by students. “This saves time in post production by marrying the background to the performances,” said Furry. “The students’ footage can then be transferred directly to their external drives in one of the TV/Film Department's editing suites using Adobe Premiere or Avid Media Composer.”

Strange New Worlds
DeSales University recently broke ground on the addition to the Labuda Center that will be the permanent home for the VP Studio. Meanwhile, the university has been renting a bay in a local car painting facility so students can use the system. “Our vice president of campus environment, Marc Albanese, was instrumental in helping us to get the beta site space as well as getting the addition built," Lewis added.

So far, the university’s virtual production capabilities have been kept in-house, although the studio may also support commercial work down the road. “The classes that can utilize the VP Studio are only limited by our own imaginations,” said Lewis. “We are starting out with our computer science classes first, as they build the ‘worlds.' Then, cinematography classes will begin in the spring. It needs to follow this sequence, as the TV/Film students need the ‘worlds’ to be completed in order to shoot their films.”

Students are already producing scenes that are "all over the map, from galactic gambling and historic courtyards inspired by Shakespeare filled with choreographed expressive dance, to a man returning to his village to find it destroyed, and a post-apocalyptic scene with fire demons,” Ruggles said. “And this was just in one semester! We are really only scratching the surface of what our students will imagine to fill the space. I am excited to see what their creativity will unleash once they feel oriented to the technology through a few courses.”

Investment in the Future
When it comes to the university's eventual return on investment for the new studio, Lewis said, "Our ROI lies in having more students in TV/film and computer science wanting to study this new technology and preparing them to use it in the work world, as well as making some very fun and awesome films.”

Ruggles sees the ROI being spread across multiple departments. “Virtual production, in this format, involves computer science, TV/film, acting, and dancing students,” she explained. “There is a lot of opportunity for students to enter the space as a knowledgeable scholar, but only as one step in the process, so that they have to engage with other knowledgeable students in a different discipline and communicate for a common goal. In this way, they learn together and about each other’s discipline, which is really the whole purpose of a liberal arts education.”

Translating the VP Studio from concept to reality hasn’t been easy for DeSales University. “But sometimes, God just has a hand in aligning all the stars,” Lewis concluded. “He has certainly helped all of us realize this dream.”

This article originally appeared on Systems Contractor News. 

BOSTON—Software developer axle ai is launching a new Pro option for its 2020 software supporting Avid Media Composer, which is designed to enable Avid editors to access Avid native and other media content remotely through any standard web browser.

The axle ai 2020 Pro software catalogs and natively represents the Op-Atom media and can export AAF sequence files to the Media Composer editor, enabling subclip collections within axle ai can be directly placed on the Media Composer timeline. The software also creates low-resolution H.264 proxies of MXF Op-Atom media that can be processed by available AI analysis engines supported in axle ai 2020; this includes axle’s Speech cloud service, as well as Microsoft’s Video Indexer.

The Pro software works with Avid’s Nexis shared storage systems as well as third-party NAS and SAN storage. Additional features include integrated upload and download capabilities for moving files to and from remote locations.

Axle ai says the software runs on either MacOS or Linux servers.

The axle ai 2020 Pro software is available for $4,750 for two users, including one year of remote access and software updates.

For more information, visit www.axle.ai.  

BURLINGTON, MASS--Avid is responding to reports that emerged out of some Hollywood studios Monday that some Apple Mac Pros running Avid Media Composer were failing to reboot or were "slowly crashing," according to a report in Variety. Some editors took to social media to advise users to not reboot their machines and to backup all of their data. Some users online speculated that the cause could be a virus attack affecting Media Composer 8.8 operating on 6.1 Mac Pro and running prior versions of MacOS on Sierra.  

Avid issued this statement:

"Avid is aware of the reboot issue affecting Apple Mac Pro devices running some Avid products which arose late yesterday. This issue is top priority for our engineering and support teams, who have been working diligently to determine and resolve the root cause. As we learn more, we will immediately publish information—directly to our customers and via our community forums and social media platforms—in order to resolve this issue for all affected customers and prevent any further issues."

Avid also released a video on Tuesday featuring Avid's CEO and President, Jeff Rosica, that offers tips to users that may be impacted by the shutdowns. Watch the video below.

UPDATE 9/25: Avid released a press release saying that it identified the root cause of the issue and that it "is unrelated to Avid and its creative tools." The release says that Google confirmed that a Chrome update may have been shipped with a bug that damages files on macOS machines. Google has announced it is pausing its release, as well as provided instructions to affected users. Avid also reports that no data was lost by affected customers.

In the press release Rosica says: "Avid is pleased that the reboot issue facing some customers is solved and while Avid products are not the root cause, we're keeping an intense focus on bringing all of our customers back online and back to work. Over the past 36 hours, the deep dive of due diligence working closely with Apple, PACE and other partner exhausted all options and we've landed in the right place as quickly as possible. We owe our special thanks to Avid's customer and user community for their typically strong show of support at this time, especially to those who welcomed our engineers into their studios."

Apple has not commented yet. 

LAS VEGAS—William Warner, who created Avid’s Media Composer, is one of 19 innovation pioneers announced as the 2019 Class of the National Inventors Hall of Fame. The recipients were announced on the main stage at CES 2019.

Introduced in 1989 as an offline editor on the Mac, Media Composer has been the dominant nonlinear editor for film and television since the mid-90’s on both Mac and Windows platforms.

A graduate of MIT, Warner founded Avid Technology in 1987. He founded Wildfire Communications in 1992, based on his invention of a telephone-based, voice-activated virtual assistant. Today, he is building a business around personalized maps, according to the NHIF. 

“I am honored to be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame," said 2019 Inductee Bill Warner, pioneer of digital nonlinear editing for video. “I love how inventions can change the world for the better, and I am thrilled to join this year’s Class.”

The innovators, whose inventions range from the UNIX operating system to fluoride toothpaste, will be celebrated as the newest Class of Inductees during the NIHF Induction Ceremony. In partnership with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), NIHF will honor these Inductees in Washington, D.C. on May 1-2 at “The Greatest Celebration of American Innovation” event.