Avid Digital Workflow Helps Wachovia Produce and Distribute More Than 700 Hours of Original Programming a Year

October 15, 2007

Source: Avid

Avid Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ:AVID) today announced that Wachovia Corporation, one of the nation's largest diversified financial services companies, is using an Avid(R) digital media production workflow to create and distribute more than 700 hours of original programming each year. In order to achieve significant time and cost savings, Wachovia's Video Network team is using a variety of Avid solutions to produce corporate programming at its headquarters in Charlotte, N.C. The programming includes interactive employee training programs, a daily 5-minute company news update and customized Wachovia-branded versions of the Bloomberg Television feed for customers at nationwide bank and brokerage branch
locations.

Wachovia is transitioning from a tape-based, time and labor intensive production process to a fully digital, Avid workflow - powered by the Avid Interplay(TM) nonlinear workflow engine and Avid Unity(TM) MediaNetwork 5.0 shared storage network, which enables a collaborative production environment.

"We've completely streamlined our processes for scheduling and taking video feeds - and cut the time needed for ingest on a given project by more than 30 percent. As a result, we can now free up a bay for editing that was previously tied up with just ingesting and digitizing video," said Nathan Dickerson, operations manager and vice president, Corporate Communications Video Network at Wachovia. "Additionally, working with file-based media offers us a variety of distribution models. We're saving time and money by distributing corporate training videos to employees' desktops - rather than sending a trainer to each office."

Johnathon Howard, director of Broadcast and Media Publishing at Avid, said, "The quantity and quality of programming Wachovia produces in-house is truly impressive and the scope and scale of the company's broadcast operations are really unmatched in the corporate financial world. This installation is a big step for Wachovia towards becoming completely tapeless. And all of the systems being used now are HD-ready, so the eventual transition to HD can be a gradual process without a major overhaul of the equipment they're currently putting in place."

In addition to Avid Interplay and Avid Unity systems, the purchase by Wachovia also included:

-- Six Media Composer(R) Adrenaline(TM) systems to create longer-form programming for broadcast across 3,500 satellite sites;

-- AirSpeed(R) and MediaStream(TM) servers for ingest and playout;

-- The Avid CaptureManager(TM) tool for coordinating feeds;

-- Avid Deko 3000(R) Hybrid and Avid DekoCast(TM) graphics systems; and

-- A Sundance(TM) FastBreak(R) NXT(TM) Automation system for controlling broadcast content.

The installation was designed and implemented with Avid reseller ClarkPowell.

"Avid solutions offer a seamless transition to tapeless operations by easily working with formats like Sony XDCAM and allowing us to bring media created with our legacy Apple graphics systems into the Avid Unity environment," said Dickerson. "We've also found that most of the editors that we want to work with prefer the Avid platform, so that definitely helped to drive our decision to invest in a more complete Avid digital workflow."

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