Avid: Helping You Stay Productive and Safe
Jeff Rosica
March 23, 2020

Avid: Helping You Stay Productive and Safe

The global response to the coronavirus outbreak is pushing the media and entertainment industry - from individual creators to the largest studios and broadcasters - to reevaluate our ways of working in order to stay safe. In these difficult times, we need to come together as a community to find creative solutions to the challenges of working remotely. I'd like to share how Team Avid is quickly mobilizing to help you stay productive, no matter where you're working.

Free Licenses 

For our commercial customers, we're offering free creative tools licenses (Media Composer|Ultimate, Pro Tools, Pro Tools|Ultimate and Sibelius|Ultimate) so team members can keep working remotely. These licenses are available through Friday, April 17th.

For students whose school campuses are closed, we'll keep creative tools in their hands so they can finish the school year on track. Any student of an Avid-based learning institution that uses Media Composer, Pro Tools or Sibelius can receive a free 90-day license for the same products. This offer is also open through Friday, April 17th.

Leverage Remote Workflows in Your Current Applications

Commercial customers using Avid platforms to manage, store or distribute content can easily tap into capabilities to extend news, sports and post workflows with remote collaboration at scale. In the short term, you can do this within your current infrastructure.

For remote editing, customers can:

- Share projects and media and stay in sync

- Log media, prep content, group multicamera footage, and collaborate with others

- Browse, search, organize, storyboard, and edit media just using a web browser

- Extend production beyond the walls of your facility

For remote access to media workflows, broadcasters can: 

- Leverage web-based access to the MediaCentral platform for a proven workflow with editorial teams

- Access iNEWS from any location

- Use VPN to keep information secure

- Create, edit, and write stories and edit video and graphics remotely

- Enable remote access for editors to work from home

To help teams transition to remote workflows, we've compiled technical documents outlining solutions options:

- For broadcast and news organizations

- For Media Composer users

- For Pro Tools users

Consider A Cloud Strategy 

For a more comprehensive solution, migrating to the cloud will achieve even greater economies of scale and performance. Several media companies are moving their workflows into the cloud with Avid platforms to find new ways to create, produce, and distribute content on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.

- Enable production teams to deploy workflows in the cloud

- Rethink the way they get their work done, especially in anticipation of difficult times when teams need to collaborate from many locations

- Deploy and operate securely in the cloud

- Improve film and television production pipeline

- Core solutions and technologies include the Avid MediaCentral|Cloud UX platform, Avid NEXIS|Cloud storage, and Avid Media Composer all running natively in the Microsoft Azure cloud

Every situation is unique. Avid's solutions experts and our cloud team are on standby to help you move to the cloud quickly.

These are extraordinary times. The safety of each and every member of our community, including our employees, is job number one. We will do whatever we can to make your difficult decisions, like temporarily closing a facility, a whole lot easier.

Keep your input coming and we'll keep working at the solutions.

Jeff Rosica

Avid CEO & President