Avid Everywhere...

[Chief Technician]

Originally Posted by peter5992

I'm kind of curious about that part. A couple of years ago I was at the ASCAP Expo in LA, one of the sessions was about "live online jamming", with researchers from Stanford and other universities. They'd been experimenting with people jamming or playing live across long distance. One of the big issues was latency, with slow moving music with long passages (Adagio for Strings etc) this isn't much of an issue, but when the pace really picks up and it becomes rhythmically drives (eg uptempo bebop), when people are several thousand of miles apart, it quickly goes off the rails. I wonder if Avid found some novel technological solution for that.

NYU and McGill have done plenty of research on this. Around 25ms of latency is where performances start to fall apart. They both have access to Internet2, which allowed them to hold joint performances with ensembles in each location with less than 25ms of latency.

The demo I saw at Avid Connect didn't involve someone playing in time with another person at a remote location. It was someone playing to a recorded track that both users had. In this case, latency is not the problem. As long as data is transmitted in sync, and stays that way, the performance will be heard at the remote site as it was heard at the originating site.

All networks have latency. ISDN has fixed latencies, which makes it great for these situations. The APT codec has a latency of 20-30ms round trip, so its quite possible you could have a musical performance with people in different locations using that as your ISDN codec. The MPEG codecs have over 100ms of latency, making musical performance with remote players impractical.

[Carl Kolchak]

Am I the only person who thinks "Avid Everywhere" sounds like and environmental disaster / industrial spill?

[peter5992]

Originally Posted by Carl Kolchak

Am I the only person who thinks "Avid Everywhere" sounds like and environmental disaster / industrial spill?

Actually this was my first association:

[reichman]

Why not just stick with FTP?
Every network I work with uses FTP, no expiration dates, anyone one can access it from anywhere. Data stays there till the owner deletes it. There's so many pros on using FPT. Clients and users can upload additional files at anytime or update their project, whether it's audio or video.

Seriously? FTP is rarely robust enough to do a proper resume function if the transfer is interrupted. It has no facility for knowing how big the file moving actually is. It won't do data de-duplication, and it won't do synchronization to multiple devices.

Services like Signiant or Dropbox are much more advanced.

[Chief Technician]

Originally Posted by reichman

Services like Signiant or Dropbox are much more advanced.

Don't talk to Signiant unless you are prepared to get regular phone calls from sales people about when you are buying one of their products.

FTP as we know it does not enable what makes Avid Everywhere and Pro Tools|Cloud work. It will be interesting to see how quickly someone working with FTP can achieve the same results as someone using Pro Tools|Cloud once Avid releases the product. My bet is that Pro Tools|Cloud would be more efficient in terms of time, and time is money.

[subbasshead]

The immediate comparison for the subscriber model of software use is Adobe & how they forced that model on their customers & existing owners. For some people it works well (eg can't afford PT HD but can afford a small monthly license fee) but there does not appear to be much/any advantage to existing owners. And lets not forget, they aren't going to do it from the goodness of their hearts - it is a business model aimed to extract more reliable cashflow...

I much prefer to sandbox my PT & make my own decisions about when/if they get upgraded, PT11 being a very good example - if/when Avid release a rock solid version of PT11 I will upgrade....