Exploring the Pro Tools Workflow Enhancements

Chairman Graeme Huon welcomed attendees and introduced our speaker Drew Parson, Audio Applications Specialist at AVID Australian & New Zealand. Graeme also introduced Leigh Spachic, General Manager of Innovative Music Australia, and thanked him for facilitating this presentation.

Drew reviewed a variety of new and sometimes overlooked Pro Tools features developed over the last four years to date with a focus on TV, post-production and music production workflows. In line with its policy of continuous Pro Tools updates, AVID developed many of these enhancements in direct response to customer feedback and evolving technical standards, practices and partner ecosystems.

Following the Section’s Annual General Meeting (see AGM Report at: http://www.aesmelbourne.org.au/2019-agm-report/ ), Graeme Huon introduced our speaker Guillaume Potard who presented to us on Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence and its relevance to the world of audio.

Guillaume started with a brief introduction to the concepts of ML and AI, introducing the concepts of artificial narrow intelligence (where it is designed for a very narrow speciality, like playing a specific game of skill, like Go), and artificial general intelligence, as in the human brain.
He went on to contrast the estimated performance of the human brain, at approx. 1000 petaflops (one thousand million floating point operations) operating at 200Hz with a power consumption of just 20 watts with the most powerful current supercomputers ( eg Tahne-2) at only 32 petaflops at GHZz ranges and with a power consumption of 25 Megawatts.