Avid Media Composer remains the premier platform for collaborative editing of projects. If you want a team working together on the same pool of media to quickly put together an edit, or multiple edits, Media Composer remains the tool of choice at the top end of the market down to the indies.
However, as we move toward more remote workflows, the focus Avid has traditionally had on locally shared storage (its Nexis systems among them) isn't as beneficial as when we all used to get in a room to work together. Postlab is hoping to help solve that by bringing its set of remote collaboration tools to Media Composer for the first time.
Postlab, originally built for Final Cut Pro X but expanding from there, is an online tool for storing project files that offers far more sophistication than you get out of just putting your project file in a Dropbox account.
Let's say you want to share the editing work with a friend hundreds of miles away. Store your project file (or, now, with Avid, individual bins) in Postlab, and it will automatically lock when you are working on it.
This means your editing partner can't open the same bin (or, if they do, they do so read-only), avoiding the dreaded conflict errors that can happen if you both try and work on the same project at the same time.
On top of that, Postlab offers an easy-to-use task management system that is well integrated with the rest of the platform so you can communicate with the rest of the team. Need your assistant editor to conform a timeline? Rather than shuttling them over to yet another task management platform, you can assign tasks within Postlab to make the workflow easier.
You can choose to store your media locally or move it up into a Postlab drive, and it can be cached in a low resolution for when you need some editors who work with lower-quality internet connections to still have access to the project. It is designed to fully integrate with Avid Nexis systems and works with anybody working with Avid Ultimate.
Avid of course has its own remote editing toolset, but for many they have proven to be a bit complicated, sometimes requiring VPN installation to manage licensing. It's a bit beyond the technical scope of some editors who just want to get on with getting work done.
With Postlab-integrated Media Composer, software that is already well designed for collaboration, we're hopeful for an easy-to-launch workflow. Now we just need Postlab to integrate Resolve databases, and we'll be all set.
