Sony’s new Media Navigator: How deep is its Final Cut Pro X integration?

fcp.co has linked to a Sony Professional UK product announcement:

Media Navigator is the powerful, affordable asset management solution that’s a perfect fit for today’s smaller and medium sized production environments.

Media Navigator orchestrates all phases of your content workflow – from ingest, catalogue and editing to review, approvals, distribution and archive.

As regards how it can support the editing phase of production, the NLE integration isn’t clear in the accompanying video which uses Avid as the example.

The interesting bit is how they describe it working with Avid, Adobe and Apple products:

Media Navigator plays nicely with today’s favourite production tools. It integrates directly at an API level with industry leading NLEs like Adobe Premiere, AVID Media Composer and Final Cut Pro.

They mention Final Cut Pro X compatibility specifically, but X doesn’t have a third-party accessible API! This point may be marketing-speak hyperbole, but you never know. Third party media management tools that ‘integrate directly’ with Final Cut Pro X can’t be created… yet!

Update from Sony Pro Europe

Following this post Sony Pro Europe tweeted a response:

All our NLE integrations are Edit in place. For FCPX we are able to create a storyboard in Media Navigator and send it to an FCPX project, that storyboard will appear in the FCPX timeline. Media Navigator Metadata is also visible from FCPX. You will be able to see the whole workflow during IBC, come and speak to us!

So initial edits – storyboards – can be done in Sony Media Navigator and sent to Final Cut Pro X as timelines in projects stored in a library whose related media has useful metadata assigned. Looking forward to seeing how producer notes entered via Media Navigator appear in Final Cut.

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