Avid® (Nasdaq: AVID) today announced that NBA Western Conference finalists and 2015 NBA champions, the Golden State Warriors, have invested in the Avid MediaCentral™ Platform to power their fast-turnaround, multiplatform media operations. By embracing Avid Everywhere™, the team’s production staff are able to collaborate from everywhere to efficiently produce Emmy Award-nominated content to support the Oakland, California-based team as it battles the Oklahoma City Thunder in the Western Conference finals.
The Warriors’ media production arm, Warriors Studio, produces a wide range of content including commercials, online video content for warriors.com and social media platforms, and video content for in-stadium entertainment at Oracle Arena. Operating from three separate locations, reporting from away games, managing huge volumes of footage, and creating content for multiple distribution platforms presented significant challenges to the team. Senior Executive Producer Paul Hodges turned to Avid based on his experience using Avid solutions while working for MLB’s San Francisco Giants.
“With the MediaCentral Platform, everything is centralized so multiple editors can work on the same content for different platforms, while everything is automatically transcoded in the background,” said Hodges. “We can now hire freelance editors even if they’re 300 miles away, and production staff on the road can quickly access content in our archives remotely. We’re a small studio doing the work of a huge facility with Avid as our backbone.”
With their new workflow powered by the MediaCentral Platform, and integrated with assistance from Cutting Edge audio and video group, the Golden State Warriors have successfully elevated the quality of their productions, and in turn, the size of their audience. The production team was recently nominated for four Emmy Awards, while NBA TV aired one of its recent shows internationally, reaching an audience of 19.1 million subscribers.
“Avid Everywhere addresses the critical challenges that sports teams like the Golden State Warriors face, enabling production teams in remote locations to collaborate as if they’re in the same studio, and simplifying the process of creating content for multiple platforms,” said Jeff Rosica, senior vice president, chief sales & marketing officer, Avid. “With the MediaCentral Platform, the team at Warriors Studio is able to create, manage and distribute world-class content from their modest facilities to support the Warriors as they vie for a place in the NBA Finals.”
Warriors Studio’s workflow consists of Avid Artist, Media and Storage Suite solutions. The production team uses Media | Director to efficiently ingest content from multiple cameras, while Avid Airspeed® is the primary ingest point for any tape-based and over-the-air media. Avid Interplay® | MAM media asset management system is used to add metadata and tag content, making it easy to browse, retrieve and repurpose. According to Hodges, sports teams don’t have the luxury of archiving content as everything remains relevant, making metadata and tagging capabilities critical for retrieving content.
Avid Media Composer® | Cloud enables editors to work remotely from different locations, while Avid shared storage enables multiple editors to work on the same pool of content for different distribution platforms, including Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, and the Warriors’ website. In future, Hodges plans to use Media | Distribute to automate the process of preparing and delivering content to multiple platforms. The team also uses the industry-standard Avid Pro Tools® digital audio software for sound editing and mixing.
