Avid Technology, the leading provider of editorial products and services for film and TV production, and Amazon Studios, a major streaming player, have announced a three-year agreement to bring cloud-based editorial to Amazon Studios’ slate of more than 300 original movies and series.
The deal will offer creative teams a cloud experience similar to that of an on-premises editorial bay, including collaborative workflows with shared storage and end-to-end media management, without the complexity and time required to set up and tear down traditional hardware.
The two companies pointed out that film editors need to access massive sets of media files that have traditionally been stored in the same location as the editing team. In collaboration with Avid, Amazon Studios will untether their editorial process to allow creative work to happen from almost anywhere, and centralize the editorial and content workflows in the cloud.
This collaboration will bring Avid’s Emmy-winning Media Composer software tool and Avid NEXIS media storage solutions to editors and other content contributors wherever they are, supporting creative teams spread across the globe.
“Amazon Studios is prolific in its sheer output of original series and features that achieve the highest standard of creativity and quality,” said Jeff Rosica, CEO and President of Avid. “By building their creative workflows around a complete set of Avid tools and platforms in the cloud, Amazon Studios is kicking off a new era of productivity and collaboration for their creative teams and contributors. Avid is delighted that our open technologies are being chosen by more customers who are innovating how content is produced in the cloud, on a global scale.”
“We are on a journey to provide a best-in-class creative platform for our productions,” added Ben Stanbury, Worldwide Head of Technology for Amazon Studios. “Studio in the Cloud is our overarching vision for how we provide our creative teams with a cloud-based toolset that they can use wherever they are in the world. Avid is a central component of this vision, so we are thrilled to be starting this new partnership with them.”
The announcement stated that “this collaboration is an important step forward for Amazon Studios’ vision of a globally scalable studio-in-the-cloud platform, which will eventually include Avid’s MediaCentral production platform.. (and that) by leveraging AWS and its global infrastructure, Amazon Studios will further centralize production assets in the cloud, creating a smoother, more unified production workflow.”