In the run-up to the launch of the new Pro Tools Cloud Collaboration platform, Avid have just released a six-part video series talking through the new features and how they are used.

We’ve also included an excerpt from Avid’s cloud collaboration blog page to show pricing and getting started details

Check out the videos and leave us any thoughts or questions we can help to answer in the comments section below.

What do I need to get started?

All customers with a perpetual license who have an active Annual Upgrade and Support Plan and all customers on a current subscription plan can access the download to install Pro Tools 12.5. Then it’s simply a matter of choosing which cloud storage plan best suits you and if you are unsure where to start, there’s a free plan to let you get an idea of how it will work for you. It let’s you have 3 projects, (that you are the owner of), and 500MB of total storage on the Avid Cloud servers and each project can have 2 collaborators. A Project is basically a Pro Tools Session that is in the Cloud (and a local cache on your system) enabling collaboration. Storage refers to any files you and your collaborators upload. If you are not the owner and just a Collaborator on a friend’s Project, that Project doesn’t count against your total storage (it counts against theirs).

Now 500MB may not seem like a lot to start with, but Pro Tools 12.5 uses a lossless compression scheme for the audio to upload to the cloud, (lossless means that it is bit for bit accurate on reconstruction), and gives you a data compression ratio of up to 3X (depending on your audio content). Normally 24 tracks of 48kHz/24Bit times 4 minutes of solid audio is roughly 785MB – which could be compressed to as small as 262MB. This really helps reduce the upload/download transfer times too.

For $ 9.99 a month you can get up to 5 Projects and 20GB of space, (which is 40 times more storage in the cloud than the free plan). For those doing big sessions/projects, you can get up to 60GB of storage and up to 10 Projects for only $ 29.99 per month.

Full details can be found on the avid Blog page here  And the Main Avid Website here.