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Camera-to-cloud
workflows accelerate the creative process. By shrinking the capture-to-edit
timeframe, editors can begin working on media instantly instead of waiting for
hard drives or delayed file transfers.
Proxy generation of original camera files to H.264
and ProRes is one of the most used features of Studio Network Solutions’ EVO Suite,
and with the latest updates this process is now faster using and also now
supports the latest RED and ARRI cameras.
Storage and media management specialist EditShare has teamed with Atomos to bring camera to cloud workflows from the
latter’s camera mounted monitor-recorders into its collaboration platform
MediaSilo via the cloud. After pairing your Atomos device via HDMI or SDI to
the Atomos Cloud and adding MediaSilo as your destination, users can upload
proxy files as they record.
It’s the latest such integration with
Atomos products. “We’ve always considered ourselves to be a neutral ‘gateway’
to a wide selection of secure destinations for our customers’ content,” said
Atomos CEO Jeromy Young.
The grandfather of camera-to-cloud is Frame.io,
which was first released in 2015 and is now being revamped by its new owners,
Adobe. The fourth version of the asset management software is “more than just
an update; it signifies a complete transformation of the product, marking the
beginning of a new chapter in how modern teams structure and manage their
creative workflows,” says Frame.io
co-founder and VP Emery Wells.
Metadata is apparently key to the new
Frame.io v4 experience. “Instead of relying solely on a rigid folder structure,
you can now organize and view your media based on how you and your team work in
a single, unified platform,” explains Wells.
Frame.io has introduced a flexible,
saved view of assets called Collections that allow users to select, filter,
group, and sort media using metadata. “Collections update in real time,
reducing the time your team spends manually culling and organizing,” the
company says. “They also allow you to organize (or reorganize) your files in
unique combinations without needing to make duplicates of your assets, which
conserves storage space. Collections is our answer to providing the kinds of
flexible workflows that you’ve long asked for, without us dictating the
approach, process, or template for how you work.”
Blackmagic Design has expanded its camera-to-cloud
workflow by enabling its latest cameras, the Pyxis and Ursa Cine 12K, to
transfer proxy (compressed) media direct to the cloud. Its overall distributed
collaboration concept for post-production relies on a piece of on-premise
hardware. Announced in 2022, the Blackmagic Cloud Store now has a new Max model with
capacity for either 24TB or 48TB, the former costing $6,495. This increased
capacity of network storage is designed to work with the sizeable files of the
12K Ursa.
One upside is media sync with DaVinci Resolve,
meaning that the moment a film crew starts shooting, the camera media will sync
within seconds so the post production team can start working.
According to CEO Grant Petty, Blackmagic Cloud Store is designed to handle the large media files
used in film and television where multiple editors, colorists, audio engineers
and VFX artists all work on the media at the same time. “It even handles
massive 12K Blackmagic RAW digital film files,” he says. “Each user gets zero
latency and they don’t need to store files on their local computer. That’s
perfect for DaVinci Resolve.”
Users can install a local cache of
media uploaded either to the Blackmagic Cloud website or services like Dropbox
and Google Drive. BMD says this makes working faster because files are
distributed globally to as many sites as customers need.
Cloud MAM and Cloud Storage
Media organizations are operating
under tighter deadlines and narrower profit margins and are looking for ways to
speed production workflows while controlling costs. This means tools for
migrating to cloud that can manage costs between tiers of “hot” and “cold”
storage, as well as between cloud and on-premise stores, are highly in demand.
EVO Suite from
Studio Networks Solutions is a media asset management tool for remote
collaborative working. The latest updates enable users to sync, replicate, and
back up media from EVO to destinations that include NAS servers on-prem in a
facility, FTP and SFTP sites, and a number of cloud storage platforms,
including Box.com, Wasabi, Backblaze, Google, AWS and Azure.
A new bandwidth throttling function
can control how much of EVO’s processing power is dedicated to automation
(transcodes for example) and how much resource to make available to editors
working concurrently on projects. A ShareBrowser integrates EVO Suite media
management directly into Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve.
“So, when a producer wants to call
out a sub-clip for the highlight reel, or leave a comment at a specific
timecode marker, those details appear directly in the editor’s timeline in
Resolve and Premiere,” the company says.
Sony has a bewildering array of cloud related
services for live streams, production and post. The company describes Networked Live as an ecosystem to “enable
production resources to be optimally connected, used, and shared” to facilitate
remote production through on-premise and cloud solutions. It also markets a
cloud gateway service called C3 Portal which can onboard live feeds from
cellular bonding links via Teradek, LiveU, and TVU Networks and in combination
with Dejero and Haivision.
Sony further offers Creators’ Cloud,
which comprises a number of cloud-based platforms and apps including a new
Multi-Cam monitoring function, as well as media management service Ci Media Cloud.
A new integration with Marquis’s Medway provides automated ingest from Ci into
Avid systems. Ci also has a new workflow to support automated VFX pulls.
Cloud object storage platform Storj and storage and
file management developer Amove have
joined forces to offer media customers a
route from on-premise into hybrid and full cloud environments.
Amove provides a desktop drive that
offers instant access to any cloud storage provider (AWS, Azure, Wasabi and 30
other providers are mentioned) into Storj. The Amove Drive allows users to
mount their storage buckets directly from the desktop, “providing a true
multi-cloud management tool that delivers immediate access to the largest files
from any cloud or on-premise storage,” according to the companies.
Features include syncs between
providers, file sharing, cloud to cloud migrations, backups, and AI powered
deduplication. Patrick Kennedy, Amove CEO stated, “After years of development
and testing over 45 services, we chose Storj as the ideal partner to deliver
our users instant capacity from Amove Drives with incredible speed, cost
efficiency and performance within an innovative architecture that supports
remote streaming and access from anywhere.”
Cloud storage specialist Backblaze is opening up its technology as a white label to third-party vendors and
other companies.
As CEO Gleb Budman explained,
“Backblaze offers companies the ability to deliver the value of our cloud to
their customers without the complexity of building their own high performance
infrastructure. We are happy to take care of that part so that businesses can
easily expand their platforms with affordable, reliable data storage.”
There are two ways customers can do
this. Custom Domains lets businesses serve content to end-users from the web
domain or URL of their choosing, “with no need for complex code,” and with
Backblaze managing the heavy lifting of cloud storage on the back end.
Software developer Azion has chosen
to go this route, with CEO Rafael Umann saying, “We can implement the security
needed to serve data from Backblaze to end users from Azion’s Edge Platform,
improving user experience.”
Organizations can also use an API to
provision cloud storage accounts from Backblaze from within their own platform.
“Our customers produce thousands of
hours of content daily and they need a place to store both their original and
transcoded files,” says Murad Mordukhay, CEO at cloud video solutions provider
Qencode. “The Backblaze API allows us to expand our cloud services and
eliminate complexity for our customers — giving them time to focus on their
business needs, while we focus on innovations that drive more value.”
Backblaze published an in-depth explanation of the features on its blog.
Wasabi AiR applies AI-driven metadata, auto-tagging and multilingual speech-to-text transcription to cloud media storage. This is the result of the company’s acquisition in January of Curio AI. Video files uploaded to Wasabi AiR are immediately analyzed and compiled into a searchable metadata index.
“Why move to the cloud if you still
can’t find anything?” said Wasabi co-founder and CEO David Friend. “Object
storage without metadata is like a library without a catalog. Wasabi AiR works
right out of the box and it’s as simple to use as popular search engines. For
example, if it finds a face that it doesn’t recognize, it asks ‘Who is this?’
Using a simple UI, the user can train their own models. You can have tens of
thousands of hours of video, and Wasabi AiR will take you right to the moment
you are looking for.”
Wasabi claims this product “greatly
reduces” the cost of metadata creation since customers pay only for the storage
with no additional charge for use of the AI.
Dave McCarthy, research VP at analyst
IDC, said, “Wasabi AiR represents a significant advancement in tackling the
longstanding issue of managing extensive data archives, within a substantial
market for intelligent media storage solutions.”
Akamai is now using NVIDIA GPUs to beef the encoding
capabilities of its cloud-based service. The new GPUs are said to be 25x faster
than traditional CPU-based encoding and transcoding methods, “which presents a
significant advancement in the way streaming service providers address their
typical workload challenges.” Use cases outlined by Akamai include transcoding
live video streams, rendering 3D graphics for VR and AR content, and for
training and inferencing generative AI.
If you broadcast, stream, or
distribute live video in the cloud, chances are you’ve spent time building,
testing, and securing your workflows. AWS has a new workflow monitor making
it easier to do this while running AWS cloud services.
It displays the relationships between
resources in a graphical signal map, so you can see which resources are in use
and how they are connected.
AWS product marketing manager Dan
Gehred says, “Once signal maps are created, you use the workflow monitor to
create and apply alarm and notification templates to alert you when issues
arise.”
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