At the 2025 NAB Show, Avid will be focusing on making work faster and easier for post production professionals as well as innovations in the newsroom.
TVBEurope sat down with chief product officer Tim Claman to discuss the company’s plans for 2025, the integration of recent acquisition Wolftech, challenges facing the media industry, and the ongoing development of its AI assistant, Ada,
What is Avid’s main focus for 2025?
As always, Avid’s goal for 2025 is to provide technology solutions and services that enable our customers to become more successful. Whether those customers are creative users, technical managers, or business leaders, Avid aspires to be a trusted technology partner that helps our customers create and distribute more compelling content, expanding their reach and relevancy with their audiences. That’s our goal – helping our customers be first to air with breaking news, drive streaming subscriptions with top tier programming, and create the next blockbuster movie.
Avid’s technology is used in multiple disciplines (post, news etc) – how is the company helping users deal with ongoing challenges being faced by the industry?
Across all the market segments we serve, Avid customers are navigating disruptive changes to business models, accelerated by rapid technology innovation. To thrive in the global market for media, our customers all need to become more efficient, and that’s where Avid comes in. We see a huge opportunity to increase efficiency by reducing or eliminating mundane tasks through the advancement of intelligent creative tools, collaboration services, and workflow automation. Then it’s up to the user to decide how they want to spend that efficiency dividend – they can lower their costs, increase the quantity of content they produce, or strive for higher quality content by spending more time crafting their content.
How can you help people working in the post sector work faster and more easily?
The teams focused on Avid’s post production offerings – Avid Pro Tools, Avid Media Composer, Avid NEXIS, and Avid Huddle – are always working to deliver enhancements that streamline workflows and enhance creative possibilities. Just a few recent examples include:
- Leveraging AI to accelerate creative workflows. ScriptSync AI and PhraseFind AI take all the pain out of searching for the best take by automating transcription and logging. And now we’re bringing that same technology to Pro Tools.
- Enhanced and simplified picture and sound workflows. You can now export Pro Tools sessions directly from Media Composer and then import them back as a ‘round trip.’ The transaction is now push-button simple and passes more information. For example, you can send markers in the timeline back and forth with comments.
- Enabling remote and distributed workflows. Avid Huddle makes it easy for anyone to join an edit session from anywhere via Microsoft Teams, interacting in real time just as if they were physically present in the edit suite.
- Bringing all the tools together. With Pro Tools, we now integrate industry leading tools directly into Pro Tools via ARA. For example, this means you no longer need to export files from Pro Tools, import them into another app like iZotope RX, then export from RX and import back into Pro Tools. You can just open RX inside of Pro Tools, along with many other powerful tools. Customers are raving about this.
- Offering flexible deployment options. We offer a broad range of choices, from installing our software on dedicated ‘bare metal’ compute platforms, to running in virtual machines, to full cloud-native deployment.
At NAB we’ll be showcasing even more examples of tech innovation that will save our customers time and help them to be more creative.
At NAB 2024, Avid announced the launch of Avid Ada, its AI assistant. What’s been the feedback from users, and how has it developed over the past 12 months?
Avid customers have consistently asked us to focus on leveraging AI in a responsible way, empowering users by reducing mundane tasks and offering more creative possibilities, without compromising their intellectual property. And that’s exactly the strategy we’ve followed with Avid Ada.
The first year of Avid Ada focused on two areas.
- Bringing speech-to-text technology directly inside Avid tools to accelerate workflows, automating transcription and logging, enhancing search, and enabling text-based editing. This journey started in Media Composer with ScriptSync AI and PhraseFind AI, but we’ve now adapted the same technology for collaborative teams at enterprise scale, with Avid Ada Transcribe for MediaCentral.
- Opening APIs for partners to integrate their AI solutions into Avid products. Across all the products, from Media Composer to Pro Tools, from MediaCentral to Sibelius, we now offer dozens of AI solutions from partners that make our customers more efficient and productive.
Can Ada go further in helping media professionals who use Avid’s technology?
Absolutely! We have only scratched the surface. Working closely with our customers, we have identified a lot of use cases for AI that increase efficiency and enhance creativity. The AI space is moving so quickly and unpredictably that our best approach is to cast a wide net and stay open to the possibilities.
TVBEurope and Avid have spoken a lot about challenges in the newsroom – how is the acquisition of Wolftech helping the company meet those challenges?
Bringing Wolftech into the Avid family is really a game changer for our customers, because we are melding together Avid’s proven solutions for traditional television newscasting with the industry’s leading solution for story-centric workflow. At NAB we will be demonstrating deep integration between Wolftech News and Avid MediaCentral, the result of which is a ‘best of both worlds’ solution for news organisations. As we bring the solutions together, our customers will enjoy a unified ‘single pane of glass’ user experience, as well as more powerful mobile tools, planning tools, analytics, and more. We are all excited to showcase at NAB the results of our hard work over the past few months. And we’re just getting started.
What do you see as the biggest challenge facing all of Avid’s customers at the moment, and how can you help?
The media industry continues to change and evolve at a rapid pace. The biggest challenges we hear about stem from rapidly evolving business models. Avid customers are all navigating this changing landscape as best they can, finding ways to produce more content, at higher quality, while engaging audiences on more platforms. As a tech vendor, Avid’s best contribution is to focus our efforts on making our customers more efficient, productive, and creative. That’s what they need and expect, and that’s what we focus on every day.
