Avid vs. Adobe vs. Blackmagic vs. Apple – A mild skirmish before a real war

Those involved in trying to make sure ‘their’ NLE wins in the ‘war of post production’ would do well to take notice of the big changes coming to post in the coming years. Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and maybe the wider Apple may come along and make the current battle seem small.

Amazon have now rebranded their Elemental acquisition as ‘AWS Elemental, an Amazon Web Services company.’

Elemental, which makes high-speed video encoding and transcoding software to enable multiscreen content delivery across different devices, was founded nine years ago in Portland, Ore., and counts among its many customers ABC, BBC, Comcast, Ericsson, and ESPN.

AWS Elemental is first being marketed as a multi-platform distribution technology company. Amazon have been making more purchases in the media area. They also now own Thinkbox – who make cloud-based and on-site based graphics rendering tools for VFX.

Thinkbox Software has provided creative tools and pipeline technology for both small and large scale projects including the worlds largest feature films. Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Thor, Green Lantern, Harry Potter, Avatar, Tron, GI-Joe the Rise of Cobra and hundreds of other films have utlized our software in front of and behind the screen. Our tools have been at the core of award winning projects, music videos, commercials and hundreds of hours of creative content spanning film, broadcast, commercial, marketing, games and web content.

If high-end VFX is something that Amazon think worth getting into, maybe general purpose video editing will come soon.

Which NLE UI and technology would be a good purchase for Amazon?