Integration of Omneon and Marquis Supports Apple/Avid Edit Workflows

Omneon has announced that the enhanced integration of its MediaGrid active storage system with Marquis Broadcast’s Medway media highway software now enables seamless migration of edit timelines between Apple Final Cut Pro and Avid editors. With the ability to migrate and recompose a Final Cut Pro timeline as an Avid sequence, production facilities can leverage these leading editing solutions more purposefully across their operations, reducing costs and eliminating workflow bottlenecks.

“More and more production facilities are adapting their use of editing systems to different kinds of work or different types of users, but until now, there was no solution that allowed users to create a rough cut in Final Cut Pro and take both sequence data and media into Avid with one simple motion,” says Granby Patrick, partner director at Marquis Broadcast. “Now, whether the editor is working with Final Cut Pro or Avid, the integration of Medway and the Omneon MediaGrid system supports a smooth, straightforward flow of data between software systems and offers the high level of performance expected of a best-of-breed storage platform for shared editing.”

The Omneon MediaGrid active storage system delivers centralized content storage that is scalable in capacity, bandwidth, and media-processing power and supports edit-in-place for Apple Final Cut Pro and Avid Media Composer and Newscutter editors. Medway from Marquis is a sophisticated media-transfer and format-conversion tool that creates a unified working environment for broadcast ingest and transmission servers and postproduction editing systems. The close integration of the MediaGrid system and Medway also enables the offloading of export and conform processes for both Final Cut Pro and Avid editing environments and gives users simple drag-and-drop or single-click control over the migration of sequences from Apple to Avid edit systems.

In a typical production setting, the pairing of Omneon and Marquis technologies allows staff to use Final Cut Pro on their workstations to create cuts-only edits and then, using a simple menu option, transfer that edit timeline to a craft editor working with Avid. Medway recomposes and rewraps the timeline and source clips for the Avid environment. In doing so, the application includes “handles” on either end of each clip — a few seconds before the in-point and after the out-point — to give the craft editor more flexibility during final edit.

While giving production facilities greater flexibility in creating efficient workflows, Medway’s support for Avid edit-in-place on the MediaGrid system also speeds finishing of the completed edit. When the edit is completed, Medway can offload conforming of the final product. The Marquis application frees up the editor for the next project even as individual clips are being pulled from the MediaGrid system, flattened into a new file, and incorporated into an open MXF file that is ready for playout.

“In large collaborative editing workflows, the integration of the MediaGrid system and Medway offers robust, scalable support for a mixed environment and the first efficient means of transitioning an edit from Final Cut Pro to Avid,” says Jason Danielson, Omneon senior director for the postproduction market. “By engendering greater compatibility between leading edit systems, this product integration gives production facilities the opportunity to build faster, more dynamic workflows and to allocate editing resources more cost-effectively.”

Omneon is on the Web at www.omneon.com.