In Broadcast - May 2014 - 66

I N T E R N A T I O N A L

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 31 - MAY 2014

N E W S

InMEDIA

Post-Production Workflows In The Cloud
Already established in the multiscreen delivery, streaming and storage environments, cloud-based
solutions are increasingly shedding their intangible nature and appearing across the chain
for production and post-production...

By Monica Heck
Contributing Editor

C

66

apitalising on the increasing
appreciation for the cost and
process efﬁciencies afforded by the
cloud, more and more broadcast
manufacturers are factoring it into
solutions right across the chain.
Stepping back from the NAB2014
cloud ﬂurry however, it's interesting
to note that the cloud has been
quietly conquering the ﬁle transfer
and media asset ingest part of the
broadcast chain for some time
now, where shooting ratios are
rising and ﬁle-based workﬂows are
well established.
"Over the last two to three years,
we are seeing organisations that use
media generally move from tape to
ﬁle, even more so in the UK," said
Jay Migliaccio, Director of Cloud
Platforms and Services at Aspera.
"And those who are on ﬁle-based
media workﬂows are looking to the
cloud for various reasons, at least

in the early stages."
He notes that the cloud has
evolved from being just a simple offsite storage, archiving and delivery
system. "It's evolved towards
encryption and transformation on
demand and eventually some kind
of order processing."
Jason Cowan, Commercial
Manager at Forbidden Technologies,
has seen a massive growth in
demand for cloud-based services
over the last few years. "When I
started in 2010, we were averaging
about 15 long-form productions in
the UK per month (on cloud video
platform FORscene), we are now
well over 100 TV productions every
single month. We found that the UK
seems to be ahead of many other
countries in terms of cloud-based
productions."
The adoption of cloud has been
cautious and gradual, however. "It's

David Peto,
CEO, Aframe

layer
"...you cantop of the
cloud on

"

other investments
The Aframe clip browser

not a rip out and replace situation,"
said David Peto, CEO of Aframe.
"The key is you can layer cloud on
top of the other investments you've
quite rightly made."
Signiant CTO Ian Hamilton
concurs, saying that while cloud
solutions can replace legacy
installs, they are more common as
a new deployment or as additional
capacity to legacy equipment.

Trends

another advantage of the cloud for
production and post-production,
according to Peto who also feels
the cloud is ideal for power intensive
tasks like transcoding and as
well as for managing production
and archiving workﬂows that are
cyclical in nature. "Streamlining
the file movement, transcoding,
storage and asset management on
a single platform provides efﬁciency
savings that are as important as the
OPEX savings."
The beneﬁts of cloud-induced
workﬂow streamlining are not lost on
Forbidden Technologies either. "A lot
of clients are looking for full logging
functionality," said Cowan. "Clients
shooting with XMPilot on Sony for
example want the metadata preingested, so the content arrives in
FORscene with whatever metadata
was captured on set."
The company also notes the
importance of cloud transcription
services for multinational projects
and for locating content and says a
strong search functionality is a key
requirement in an era where data
volumes are soaring. "They needed
logging and search tools outside
of the usual post environment,
to be able to work outside of
the post environment and away
from traditionally very expensive

Aframe platform in action on a standard internet browser

The big advantage of cloud in the
broadcast workﬂow is of course
cost saving. Companies don't need
to invest in in-house equipment
that may lay dormant during quiet
times and in the human overheads
that go with it.
The cloud also allows companies
to take all their media off expensive
on premise systems like asset
management systems and only
store locally the media that is
needed in that moment. "You can
free your edit suites from tasks
like media viewing, rough cutting
or idea sharing. The edit bays are
only being used for proper editing
then, meaning you're increasing
the capacity of your existing setup and making those investments
last longer," said Peto.
Moving ﬁles rapidly over general
internet bandwidth instead of
an internally funded pipeline is

Aspera Shares diagram

Forbidden Technologies' main FORscene interface

CONTINUED ON PAGE 68

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