axle ai announced a new Pro option for its axle ai 2020 software that supports Avid’s Media Composer professional editing software. With the new axle ai 2020 Pro module, Avid editors now have the powerful new capability of accessing both native Avid media and a wide range of other media remotely, through any standard web browser. This type of collaborative workflow has rapidly taken over from traditional in-person editing workplaces since the advent of COVID-19, and is likely to remain a fixture in the industry moving forward. Axle ai 2020 already provides workflows for Adobe’s Premiere Pro CC application and Apple’s Final Cut Pro X.
In addition to cataloging and natively representing the Op-Atom media, axle ai 2020 Pro also includes the capability to export AAF sequence files to the Media Composer editor, so that collections of subclips from within axle ai can be directly placed on the Media Composer timeline. In addition, the software creates low-resolution H.264 proxies of MXF Op-Atom media which can then be processed by a range of available AI analysis engines supported in axle ai 2020, including axle’s own axle Speech cloud service and third party AI services such as Microsoft’s Video Indexer (for face recognition, object recognition and onscreen character recognition) and Speechmatics’ transcription engine.
Sam Bogoch, CEO of axle ai, said “It has always been our mission to bring the power of remote video search, collaboration and transcription to an ever-wider group of creative teams. Avid’s Media Composer software is a flagship solution used broadly by top editors in Hollywood as well as the wider broadcast industry. We’re delighted to introduce support for this application and its file formats and workflows” The software works with Avid’s Nexis shared storage systems as well as with a wide range of third party NAS and SAN storage. It also includes integrated upload and download capabilities for moving large media files to and from remote locations.
Axle ai’s systems are installed at over 600 postproduction teams worldwide, including at dozens of prominent national and regional broadcasters. Gerry Field, Vice President of technology at American Public Television, said “axle made it possible to get a system appropriately scaled for what we need, and for the resources that we have. The two equal parts are cost and complexity. There are a lot of asset management products in the market that, particularly for my needs, are tremendously overbuilt. We needed something that could be installed easily and give us access, quickly, to the content that we need to see.” I was able to get it spun up and operational inside of three days and get axle ai into the adoption cycle.”
