Avid Interplay installing this month

By Ken Kerschbaumer

Avid
Technology’s Interplay, the world’s first nonlinear workflow engine,
which fuses integrated asset management, workflow automation, and
security control into a single system to deliver a business-wide
solution for post production and broadcast customers of any size, is
beginning deliveries this month.

The system offers a broad range of low-cost
tools for searching, archiving, viewing, logging, automatic
transcoding, dual-resolution encoding, and intelligent tracking of
multi-resolution proxy files, all of which streamline collaboration
between people and eliminate time-consuming production tasks.
In
addition, the Avid Interplay system is open to any media production
environment – accommodating more than 100 different media and non-media
file types – and can link to production tools from virtually any other
company.

“The single, most significant challenge in media
production today is that very few people work alone – but despite that
fact, very few vendors make it easy to collaborate,” said Chas Smith,
vice president and general manager for Avid’s Video division. “As we’ve
worked with customers to identify the roadblocks in media production,
they’ve told us that they need greater help finding and storing files,
tracking revisions and progress, and managing signoffs and approvals.

Avid
Interplay addresses these and other workflow challenges by providing
open access to – and interoperability between – all shared assets,
tasks, and connected systems in a secure environment. Everyone with
production responsibilities can use Avid Interplay – including
producers, graphic artists, assistant editors, IT administrators,
writers and storyboard artists, video and audio editors, directors,
archivists, and even legal and finance departments.
“No other
combination of workflow products on the market can help move projects
from preproduction to final delivery and archive with greater
efficiency than Avid Interplay,” says Smith.

The core Avid
Interplay system is a client-server engine that works with any member
of the Avid Unity™ MediaNetwork family of shared-storage solutions to
form the backbone of a completely interoperable media production
environment. The engine arms individual contributors, project teams,
and functional departments with a portfolio of low-cost, user-friendly
software tools that automate routine production tasks, track revisions,
and streamline administrative activities. It also offers a
business-wide workflow that tracks all Avid projects as well as more
than 100 media and non-media file types, including multi-resolution
video, Microsoft Office documents, Adobe Photoshop and AfterEffects
layered files, MPEGs, TIFs, spreadsheets, and more. The standard
components that make this powerful workflow possible include:

Interplay
Engine – a PC server that connects to an Avid Unity media network to
act as a central nervous system, providing powerful and secure
data-driven access to active and archived media assets; and Interplay
Access – the user software client for the Interplay Engine, bringing
powerful search, check-out/check-in, revision control and management
capabilities to ordinary desktops and laptops on the network.

Customers
can augment these out-of-the box components of the Avid Interplay
system with a range of optional toolsets for deploying a more
comprehensive workflow that delivers unprecedented productivity gains.
As bandwidth demands grow, customers can add Avid Unity capacity to
increase data throughput of the entire system.

The Avid
Interplay system also eliminates the time-consuming process of
initiating and managing media transcoding, then linking and tracking
various resolutions for proxy review, offline, finish, delivery, and
archive. The system allows customers to work natively on any
resolution, use a background network service to transcode to different
resolutions, and work with as many resolutions and formats of a clip as
necessary. Because all of the Avid Interplay tools can work with any
resolution, and projects maintain links to any file variations, the
process of switching between resolutions is quick and easy. The options
that deliver multi-resolution workflows include:

Pricing for the
Avid Interplay system, with the Interplay Engine and Access toolsets,
begins at $18,000. The system is expected to be available in Q3 2006.

Optional Toolsets include Interplay Assist, Interplay
Transcode, Interplay Low-Res Encode, Interplay Archive, and Interplay
Transfer.