What is the value of something if you know it exists but you cannot find it? A long search has consequences–wasted time, you could be doing something else, and, ultimately, frustration over the inefficient process. The ability to locate content during media production remains a major challenge across media organizations, which is why the role of metadata is so important. Labelling or tagging items correctly, logging material, adding information which can aid in that discoverability process, plus, of course, the use of artificial intelligence to further enrich the metadata is vital.
There is a solution. Search is a critical component of Avid’s media production asset management systems, with constant updates being applied. The last version of MediaCentral provides a range of new features to help journalists, researchers, producers, and editors find media faster than ever, allowing them to focus on creative tasks.
There are three big features to call out:
- In folder searching. Users who have previously used MediaCentral UX, Interplay Assist, or the MediaCentral| Production Management Window in Media Composer will love the ability to search in a single folder to find what they need super-fast.
- Super Pill searching. The new Super Pill concept enables users to group multiple search criteria together to search all at once. For example, choosing to search ten different metadata fields with the same search term. This is a huge time saver.
- In-line hits display. When searching and receiving multiple time-based metadata results, the timeline-based display provides an easy way of showing where those hits are within the clip.
Bear in mind that these advances come on top of existing search functionality such as AI-powered phonetic searching (the ability to search words in audio), multi-site search where users can search not just their own, local system, but also other systems within their network or station group, and auto-refresh searches where the search automatically updates every 60 seconds with new results.
The MediaCentral 2023.7 version is the next Long-Term Maintenance (LTM) version of MediaCentral, building on the program announced last year, when the first LTM release came out – MediaCentral 2022.3. From this version to 2023.7, more than 300 media production features and updates have been implemented, from completely new apps such as MediaCentral | Acquire to greater orchestration capabilities.
Search is only one area of MediaCentral which has been updated in the new release. There are also updates to:
MediaCentral | Collaborate Mobile: The iOS app has a new light mode and can now display a calendar view, giving users the ability to view their jobs for the day or week ahead on the go.
The Rundown app in MediaCentral | Cloud UX: There is new functionality to enable producers to add and view timing information for back time and cume time calculations, plus the ability to view live show timing when a show is on-air.
New codec support. There is end-to-end support for the popular XAVCi Class 100 codec in 1080p 50 and 59.94 frame rates.
New cloud connectors and transcoders. There is a wider range of cloud-hosted services which can be accesised on AWS, Microsoft Azure, and GCP.
Security Updates: Security is a critical component and is constantly updated with every release. In addition, work has been completed to support OKTA authentication, plus the option to support other multi-factor authentication providers.
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