Avid Launches Latest Versions of Maestro | Designer, Maestro | News

Avid has released the latest versions of its Maestro | Designer and Maestro | News solutions. The new versions enable content creators to create superior, high resolution graphics more efficiently than ever before.

Avid’s award-winning Maestro | Designer graphics authoring software has been enriched with even greater rendering power to create higher quality graphics and enhance visual identity and production value exponentially. Graphic designers can now create and view their content in 4K resolution without having to adjust the resolution of their graphics. Improved workflow efficiencies have also been added to Maestro | Designer to increase productivity and enable the turnaround of content even faster, including font handling, animation editing, and mask editing.

Avid has also enhanced its Maestro | News on-air graphic suite with significant workflow efficiencies for both news and production environments. With the latest version of Maestro | News, users can quickly and easily reuse content and even mirror data between different production systems. Its simplified workflow now facilitates faster page creation and the ability to manage complex content more efficiently through its new rundown filtering capability.

“To maximize engagement, today’s broadcasters must create outstanding content that’s tuned for any consumer device,” says Alan Hoff, VP of Market Solutions, Avid.  “The latest enhancements available in Maestro l Designer and Maestro l News help broadcasters deliver video and 3D graphics in new and compelling ways to audiences everywhere.” 

Maestro | Designer features include:

The latest Maestro | Designer offers numerous enhancements and improvements including improved categorization and handling to ease workflow and boost productivity. Users can now set specific animation start and end points for more precise playback, and work with and edit object masks more easily with the new Show Masks function. A new Scissor mask allows users to add a whole layer for more creative flexibility, and gain resolution independence with Scalable Vector Graphics.

Users can gain more powerful Avid RenderEngine performance with numerous under-the-hood improvements — using existing hardware. Without changing any other components, Maestro | Designer enables creative professionals to create higher quality graphics and augment visual identity and production value exponentially.

With support for high-resolution monitors, Maestro | Designer can now scale its application display to the required resolution, making it easier to prep, create, view, and refine content in up to 4K resolution.

Maestro | News features include:

Maestro | News provides new support for the Array control and exposers capability introduced in Maestro | Designer and RenderEngine. With Array control, users can set the timing of exported elements directly in the Maestro | Designer animation timeline while creating content, which will then trigger data being sent to a Maestro | News property. Maestro | News pages can also now retrieve data values directly from a RenderEngine-loaded scene and send them to a completely different scene, providing a fast and easy way to reuse information or mirror data between different production systems.

New extended timeline scripting capabilities greatly accelerate the Maestro | News page creation process. This feature extends page script functionality further, enabling scripts to send exports and control animation, reducing the number of tracks needed in the timeline.

With new rundown filtering capabilities, users can manage the content of complex stories and large rundowns more easily than ever by using different search keywords or phrases to apply a filter in the rundown to locate stories. Additionally, the new filter applies to the content inside any item, making it easier to find the exact story needed.

Maestro | News now offers a new Auto Still Cue settings option for the video playback module, enabling a clip to display relevant metadata in its first frame or in point when the video item is cued, facilitating better information sharing with production teams. Video items can be added from the MediaCentral | Maestro News app directly to a MediaCentral | Newsroom Management rundown. This enables access to media storage, quick creation of media In and Out points, and the ability to preview media and add it to the Maestro | News rundown, improving graphics and video workflows in news and production environments.