Here at the Prism booth with David Krall, President and CEO of Avid. Avid made a bold start with their press conference yesterday; some cool new tools—like software-only Media Composer—but more importantly Avid is ready to tackle the big picture of enterprise integration for media. And not just for Avid tools.

David Krall:

What I love about this year is that more than ever what we’re doing is tied back to our longstanding strategy. That’s partly because of where the world is in the evolution of technology now—we can finally tie together video and audio; now we’re finally got that layer—the glue that can connect it together not just for the edit suite but for the enterprise.

Let me back up. What I mean by overall strategy is this. We’ve always prioritized four things: making the best tools for the world’s content creators, delivering seamless interop among all the pieces, delivering open solutions that use open standards, and giving great customer service. This year we reaised the bar on all those fronts.

Let’s take one example. Something people have been asking for is here: a software-only Media Composer. Great tool right? But look at it in context. If you pair it with the brand new Mojo SDI (Mojo acceleration with SDI IO—so big brother to the Mojo) you can have a whole edit suite for under $8K—that’s not just a lite version—that’s the full Media Composer, everything people expect from that tool. Mac and PC ships in the same box—with Interplay integration built in. And this is the most exciting development of all. Interplay is what we call the world’s first non-linear workflow engine. That’s because it fuses together three elements—integrated asset management, workflow automation, and security control. So the idea is that whether you’re an individual artist or a shop of any size you can choose whether to take advantage of the Interplay capabilities no matter what Avid product or products—or other third party products—you use. So this is major interop, but it’s also completely open, which for a lot of people is news from Avid.

You hear people refer to the dead moose in the room—the thing that no one wants to talk about. For us it was the idea that Avid storage—indeed all of Avid infrastructure—wasn’t really open. This year with Avid Interplay we shot the moose. We went even further with our Open Storage Initiative; that let’s any Mac or PC third party app hang off of our storage. Doesn’t matter whose name is on the editing system, doesn’t matter what support tools you depend on, they can play.

This isn’t just important to Avid. I really do believe that we are at an inflection point in the industry—for everyone. Up until now it’s been all about tackling the tools issues of moving from analog to digital. The opportuntity now is that we’re right on the cusp of being able to tie it all together. Media worlds tends to lag behind the larger enterprise community. Look what SAP has achieved there—a level of integration that hasn’t really existed in the world of media, whether because of file size, data rates, etc.

But in our industry, now you can taste it—you can see the interop among our products—you can see things like multi rez workflows becoming truly practical, and with the idea of an overarching layer, you start to bring in very specific security and access control, right down to the metadata level, that let’s you shape your workflow based on what you’re trying to do.