Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/908245
16 F A L L 2 0 1 7 C A S Q U A R T E R L Y An interview with Avid's Director of Digital Business Development Rob D'Amico Pro Tools? b y G . J o h n G a r re t t C A S A t the AES show in New York on October 18, I sat down for a few minutes to talk with Avid's Director of Digital Business Development Rob D'Amico. It was less of an interview and more of a "Tell Me Everything" session, and Rob came through with some of the latest news, starting with the benefits of their new subscription service for Pro Tools. RD: We don't have to wait for monolithic releases or wait for releases once or twice a year; it's continuous development. As we finish functionality and capability updates for our end- users' needs, we deliver to them. By being on a subscription plan, you can reap those benefits right away. In June, we partnered with Dolby Atmos to deliver a very integrated way of mixing for Dolby Atmos right within Pro Tools. That's a huge undertaking that makes the workflow of mixing for Dolby Atmos like it is for mixing to 5.1 or 7.1; it's very intuitive, very easy. We actually got a lot of customer feedback through our beta testing and bringing people in and asking them how they want this to function. We worked very closely with Dolby Atmos on the integration. Now our actual panner has been modified to be an object-based panner (See our article in this issue entitled "Dolby Atmos and Pro Tools 12.8: User Insights" for some user feedback on the Atmos integration). GJG: I guess the other thing about the subscription service is that any change you need to make, if there's a bug in the field, you can propagate it back into the field right away, right? RD: You can. We want to make sure that with every release, we add value and functionality—we don't want to just do bug-fix releases. I say that because we want to make sure that a "dot" release is adding value to the workflows. Like today, we just announced and released 12.8.2, which is a big update from 12.8. It's packed full of functionality for our Pro Tools First users, our Pro Tools users, and our Pro Tools HD users. So that ranges the gamut from aspiring professionals to the high-end post-production mixer or film editor. It is really powerful to see the number of talented customers we have that subscribe and use Pro Tools as a product of choice. What's new in GJG: What else is new? In 12.8.2 for the post world, we did more updates for Dolby Atmos to enhance that workflow further. So if you've got a session that you now want to mix for Dolby Atmos that was already created, you can now easily repurpose automation data for mixing to object-based elevation data. Along with that, being able to set up your Dolby Atmos renderer for routing purposes. Another improvement is the addition of Ambisonics support. We're supporting first, second, and third ordering for Ambisonics workflows. We've actually partnered with Facebook to bundle their special workstation plugins—which is all the 360 plugins, immersive audio, 3D mixing. So that comes with Pro Tools HD 12.8.2. It was great working with them and we look forward to doing a lot more partnerships like this in the future. As far as the post-production world where, obviously, time is of the essence, we've also enabled some quick editing functionality for scrolling to tracks. So if you have a long list of tracks, you can start typing in the name and it will go right to that track. Also, batch renaming of tracks and clips, because often when you have field recorder media or have imported an AAF from Media Composer or some other NLE, sometimes clip names can be pretty unintuitive. Now you can select a whole region of clips and batch rename them, adding a number at the beginning or end, or removing some text from the clip names in a "find and replace" operation. It's a really powerful new function. Along with that, we have put a lot of energy into creating "tips and tricks" videos around these new features so our customers can find out quickly how these new features work.