New Avid Interplay, AirSpeed Products Suppport H.264 Media

Avid released new versions of its Interplay Production 2.3 asset management system and AirSpeed Multi Stream 1.7 ingest and playout server. When combined, the systems create a wide-area production environment where H.264 proxy media are generated in real time, logged and rough-cut edited, and continuously linked back to HD material.

Interplay Production 2.3 and AirSpeed Multi Stream 1.7 support native XDCAM, AVC-Intra and DNxHD formats. The new H.264 proxy workflows extend these to the wider corporate network, via Avid’s cross platform Interplay Access client application. In addition, expanded format and tool support in Interplay Production offers customers a broader range of collaborative postproduction and audio workflows.

Interplay Production enables broadcast and production facilities to efficiently manage centralized media assets and extend access to remote users. By incorporating AirSpeed Multi Stream as part of the production workflow, customers can automate feed recording, encode proxies of high-resolution media, and transparently move files from shared storage to air for playout.

H.264 proxy workflow and enhanced aspect ratio handling allows customers to handle heavy media traffic over corporate networks, implement WAN media workflows and offer fast access to archived material by providing them with files that require less bandwidth and storage than original HD files. AirSpeed Multi Stream supports the H.264 format with an optional field-installable board that offers customers dual resolution ingest to provide high-quality, yet lightweight proxies of HD material, accessible anywhere on a corporate LAN or WAN, using a Mac or PC system. Support for the 1.2Mb/sec H.264 proxy format in Interplay Production works in conjunction with AirSpeed Multi Stream to track, manage, and maintain proxy media and metadata synchronization with high-resolution media, which requires less storage capacity and network resources to ultimately reduce costs and allow easy remote viewing, logging, and reuse of material. In addition, the Interplay Access video client now automatically adapts to 16:9 HD and other non-4:3 aspect ratios for accurate display and improved proxy workflow.

Interplay Production now offers support for 24p/23.976p high-resolution format. Interplay Production 2.3 also expands audio workflow capability with support for Pro Tools on Mac OSX.

Optimized XDCAM send to playback significantly speeds time-to-air for XDCAM files when using the Interplay STP Encode service and AirSpeed Multi Stream.

The 32GB memory expansion option for Cluster Engine servers provides ample room to grow through expanded database support for more than 10 million media assets in a single workgroup.
Interplay Production 2.3 and AirSpeed Multi Stream 1.7 are available now.