A theme for NAB 2010: Openness
Posted By
Michael Kammes on
April 13, 2010 12:00 am |
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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 thatApple?