The following is the first in a series of 10 blog posts in “Interplay Innovations,” part two of our Interplay blog series. In this series, we’ll discuss how the recent developments in Interplay Production 3.0 give modern workgroups the tools to overcome challenges in an era where media is created and consumed everywhere.
In the first Interplay blog series Demystifying Avid Interplay, I gave an overview of the Avid Interplay product family. I discussed how we define ‘media enterprise’ at Avid and laid out Interplay’s history and evolution since it entered the market in 2006. I also tried to give a sense of why we believe recent innovations such as Interplay Central and Interplay Sphere not only will build on Interplay family’s long-standing success in media asset management, but will help drive us to our goal of setting a new industry standard for creative collaboration.
This time around, in part two of the blog series, I’ve recruited fellow members of the Interplay team to discuss the newest features and options in Interplay Production. With each of the developments in version 3.0, released this past June, we are taking every necessary step forward in helping modern workgroups tell the best stories possible in an era where content is being created and consumed everywhere.
Each blog entry in this series will take a close look at a new feature in Interplay Production, a meaningful enhancement to an existing one, or a significant improvement in Interplay’s architecture. Some of the workflow topics we will cover include multi-cam, messaging, multi-platform distribution, and much more. We’ll provide some insight into design rationale and how we think the features discussed in the series will help workgroups achieve their creative vision and business goals.
We hope this series entertains as much as it informs. As always, thanks for reading.
Ian
A large part of my responsibility as a product designer (and indeed for our entire Interplay design team) is to pound the pavement and talk to as many media professionals of as many personas, workflows, genres, and markets as we can find. We study their routines, their ‘day-to-day’, their workarounds, their successes, their frustrations, and everything in between. This often makes for engaging discussions about our industry and I learn what motivates media professionals to return to work each day. Having been an editor for over 15 years before joining Avid, I find these discussions genuine, relatable, and a large part of why I enjoy my gig as a designer. While it is difficult to encapsulate all that I (and we) have learned over the last couple years from visiting media enterprise sites, I can say two primary trends seem to have had a profound and permanent impact on media production workflows.
On the acquisition side, the rapid proliferation of file-based video recording devices has been tremendous. Among others, mobile phones, compact DSLRs, rugged ‘action’ cameras, gaming engines, and ‘greater than HD’ cameras, cranking out wonderful RAW images that offer killer levels of image control, have all become everyday tools. As a propeller-head and general fan of camera technology, I’m fascinated with this wave of innovation, but the editor in me laments the ever-growing heap of formats and resolutions that come with it. Many of the post teams I’ve had the chance to visit feel conflicted in the same way, excitement paired with anxiety. Also worth noting is that file-based cameras have become much cheaper as have their recording media, thus driving up shooting ratios and the propensity for multi-camera shoots overall.
Another trend that seems to have permanently changed media enterprises is on the distribution side of things. In lock step with the emergence of mobile devices and the viability to push quality video over the web, the number of distribution outlets by which to share and consume content has exploded. Social media, video streaming, game consoles, time- and place-shifting set top boxes (such as DVRs and Slingboxes), and more have disrupted all traditional definitions or metrics for audience. In turn, viewing behaviors have also shown dramatic shifts as new trends such as binge viewing and various second screen patterns have emerged. The feature article in the April issue of WIRED Magazine does a fantastic job of breaking down ‘the new rules of a hyper-social, data-driven, actor-friendly, super-seductive platinum age of television.’ (Very much worth a read.)
Courtesy Devoncroft Partners, LLC
It’s easy to see how media enterprises are being caught in the crossfire between these acquisition and distribution trends, as shown in Devoncroft’s 2013 BBS Broadcast Industry Global Trend Index, and how budgets are being subdivided by their variables, causing relentless cost pressures. That said, these trends won’t come as a surprise to many media professionals as they have been many years in the making and likely most pros have been dealing with them for some time now.
What is salient however is the challenge for media enterprises to achieve an operational efficiency that:
Puts creative talent in a position to concentrate on making great content by pushing non-creative or administrative tasks to the background,
Eliminates all unnecessary logistical costs of finding, retrieving, sharing assets within one or across several workgroups, and
Establishes a bridge to a target audience at the moment when and on the platform by which they want to watch.
There is no question that media enterprises that can make this transition stand to capitalize on new opportunities and those who do not will struggle in a fundamentally more diverse era of content creation and consumption.
We have found that for a great many media enterprises, a traditional infrastructure where a group of edit workstations are connected only by shared storage have become outmoded. The ability to share the same footage is still critical, but for many workgroups it does not go far enough to address the needs to engage audiences more frequently, create opportunities to attract new audiences, and to monetize assets sitting on the shelf. This is leading many media enterprises of varying sizes and types (news, sports, post, web-original, government, advertising, gaming… you name it) rapidly toward environments where media asset management is a primary focus.
Establishing and maintaining an audience is not a single event nor is it a series of events—it is a non-stop conversation. When you consider all of the content that is successful in the market today, a large majority of it furnishes several ways for viewers or fans to connect between episodes, seasons, games, reports, events, etc. Even successful independent film or web-original projects build an early audience through continuous web video and social updates (such as through Kickstarter), as well as before and after key screenings. Two of my favorite examples of this are inspiring documentaries, Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky’s Indie Game and Stacy Peralta’s Bones Brigade: An Autobiography. So, regardless of the content type, project or budget, the more a workgroup can keep the conversation rolling and keep an audience engaged with well-crafted content, the greater the probability of success in viewership, fan loyalty, brand affinity, etc.
Image Caption: Consumers now drive their own personal viewing experience, forcing changes in how media enterprises must reach their target audiences. [Click image for larger view]
For many workgroups, the ability to quickly retrieve an asset, such as master clip or sequence with markers, from a managed library that can span across cost effective storage tiers (i.e. online, nearline, or archive storage) has an enormous impact on audience. For example, attracting a viewer to watch another episode, celebrating the moment an athlete achieves a career milestone, building a convincing character through a thematic flashback of moments from previous seasons, or adding the perfect element to an audio mix or motion-designed promo can all be achieved through effective media asset management. These are just a few examples of what media enterprises tell us they desperately want to and need to achieve, regardless of their size, location, or relationship in any given project chain (such as a post house to a network, a stadium-based production staff to a sports league, etc.). We are likely to cover more examples during the course of this blog series.
Because of this overall shifting landscape driven by the changes in acquisition and distribution, our team is constantly searching for ways to provide media enterprises with the tools they will need to be successful now and in the future. Going into the planning of Avid’s Interplay Production 3.0 release, we wanted to tear down the notion that media asset management and remote connectivity is a privilege reserved only for large organizations. In fact, large organizations such as broadcasters have told us they seek to have a greater degree of integration with other parts of their organization and their production partners in order to collaborate more easily and to be able to share assets more efficiently.
The new Interplay Solution Packages help small to medium media enterprises overcome the grind of acquisition and distribution challenges.
We decided that one of the first steps in addressing these needs was to issue two new Interplay Solution Packages called ‘Starter’ and ‘Facility’ that will help small to medium workgroups transform the efficiency of their environments to meet modern challenges. Both of these packages build up from Interplay Production and ISIS shared storage configurations and also feature the latest Media Composer innovations.
It’s also important to note that our web- and mobile-based client Interplay Central (and architecture), which I discussed in a previous blog entry, is included in the packages by default, opening the opportunity for remote collaboration for any workgroup. The Interplay Sphere option, which was also described in a previous post, allows editors working in Media Composer from a remote location to participate in a workgroup over 4G, Wi-Fi or LAN, and is included in the ‘Facility’ Solution Package.
With both packages, we’ve tried to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts by including all the tools to help small and medium media enterprises become more dynamic in the way they function day-to-day and in the way they address the disrupted state of media viewership and consumption. Most importantly, we believe the tools we included in these packages will help provide customers with a foothold to overcome the relentless grind of acquisition and distribution challenges by having access to an open, integrated, collaborative media platform that serves as a base not only to ingest, manage and create content, but to distribute it as well.
Stay tuned for further blog entries as we highlight more of the recent Interplay Production 3.0 innovations and how they meet the needs of modern content creation. In the next entry, we’ll take on the topic of multi-cam workflows and new tools within Interplay Central.
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