| There’s been an emerging trend in the post realm over the
past few years and it’s not surprising that this year at NAB continues this
trend…the trend of openness. While
companies and their technology proved to be much more initially lucrative when
they were a closed ecosystem - the backlash from dead bolting ones product
proved not only to be a revenue suck, but also caused the perception of
arrogance or even ignorance. The
collective grumbling from the user communities of these products seems to have finally
fallen on sympathetic ears, and a whole host of cross-armed, head shaking
entrenched old world practices are now replaced and subsequently embrace the
notion of collaboration and not confrontation.
Many examples can be found from some of the juggernauts at
this years NAB. As you probably know by now, Avid is now warmly welcoming several other players into its inner circle. With the adoption of Matrox’s MX02
Mini, editors now have an inexpensive, yet high quality output device from
Media Composer – something users have been clamoring for since day one. Until now, this functionality was only
available on Avid hardware at 10X the cost. Plus, the opening of Avid’s AMA to QuickTime, ensures that
just about any video file that you may come across can now play natively within
your timeline, thus negating the need to exclusively use Avid's MXF or OMF file
structure. Yes, this does mean that its biggest competitors video du jour ProRes, can be now be played within Avid.
Next, we have Squareboxes CatDV – a fantastically robust digital
asset management solution. CatDV
not only organizes, catalogs and manages data, but also has the ability to
utilize the video data by creating Final Cut Pro sequences from collections of
clips within it’s database. It
also can generate Avid compatible files and sequences. This allows for an extremely easy
interop between your NLE of choice and the asset management system. As an added bonus, its database can
utilize databases created from other asset management solutions.
Root6’s Content Agent – which is an intelligent node based
encoding solution, announced the new ability to partner with and even utilize
one of it’s competitors products - Telestream's Episode Engine. This powerful combination allows for the Windows based Content Agent to
encode into Pro Res. With the
Apple imposed limitation of only being able to decode ProRes on a PC, Content
Agent becomes the first O/S agnostic transcoding platform. All with help from its market share
rival.
These are just a handful of examples hopefully paving the
way for the future of the industry: collaboration for the benefit of your user
base. Hear that Apple?
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