In Broadcast - May 2014 - 68

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 Cont.
Jeremy Pollard,
Product Manager
of Frankie at
Cospective

company
"...Ouraround the was
built
concept of working
at a distance

"

Cospective's Frankie recently has added full frame collaborative video reviews

kit," said Cowan.
One of the big advantages of
cloud solutions for production
and post-production therefore is
immediacy. "We take content from
in-house tools but in the last year,
people have been putting their native
rushes straight into FORscene. In
the past, they would be couriering
drafts, waiting for ingest and would
68
Ian Hamilton,
CTO, Signiant

"...Certainly when
you look at cloud
surveys, particularly
SaaS, people's
concerns are
still security and
performance

"

not have the ability for immediate
feedback to location."
This cloud-generated immediacy
beneﬁts collaborative working, which
is the key aim of Australian company
Cospective. "Our company was built
around the concept of working at
a distance," said Jeremy Pollard,
Product Manager for Frankie at
Cospective. "Our solutions are
aimed at helping people function as
if they are sitting in the same room
and we take advantage of cloud
infrastructure to do that."
He says the cloud means people
don't have to rely on the "dark old
ages of FTP" or on data wranglers
getting files from one place to
another. "Post-production is the
most natural ﬁt for us, but there
are also quite a few production
companies using our tools."

Challenges
Over the last few years however,
the cloud has gradually changed
the very nature of the production
and post-production ecosystem.
"Produc tion c ompanie s a re
increasingly trying to save by
spending less money at post
houses," said Cowan. "They're
trying to do as much as they
can themselves and the cloud
helps with that."
This approach generated
pushback from post-houses at ﬁrst
as they were seen to be taking away
from chargeable services such as
the creation of viewing copies on
DVD. "That perception seems to
have changed, the post houses have
evolved too. We treat the post house
as a reseller and have changed our
model to suit them."
Security concerns still shadow the
cloud, particularly when it comes
to highly valuable content where
old habits die hard. "Some people
have been a bit reluctant to look at
new ways of working," said Pollard.
"The problem I guess is that when
something goes wrong it goes very
high proﬁle even if its impact isn't
signiﬁcant. That puts the technology
adoption back by several years every
time it happens. In the broadcast
TVC world, there's less resistance
to that, maybe because of the style
and smaller size of those projects?"
Hamilton however feels the
beneﬁts of a cloud-based SaaS
platform are starting to attract the
industry. "The market has really
changed in the past year and a
half. Certainly when you look at
cloud surveys, particularly SaaS,
people's concerns are still security
and performance."
The company has put a lot of
effort into alleviating people's
concerns through independent
security evaluations, staff training
and what they call 'least-privilege'
based management of staff.

"Ultimately, prove it by signing up
more customers to our Media
Shuttle service."
Peto and Cowan, who largely
credit the signing of large visible
projects and the advocacy of the
freelance market for a change in the
negative perception of cloud security,
also hail the power of word of mouth
in combatting security concerns.
Moving data quickly in and out of
cloud storage is a rising challenge,
which Aspera is tackling. "Getting
data on or off cloud storage through
traditional TCP or HTTP methods
doesn't work for large ﬁles, as it
lacks scalability," said Migliaccio.
At NAB this year, Signiant also
released a new cloud-based
product, SkyDrop, as a commercially
available hybrid SaaS solution to
accelerate the movement of big data
and professional media ﬁles in and
out of cloud storage.

Good Connections
Bandwidth limitations, still a major
hurdle in some parts of the world, are
something cloud-service providers
are working to alleviate. "Some
of the connections, particularly
in Asia, are unreliable and slow,"
said Pollard. "With Frankie and
cineSync, the initial upload of data
is dependent on bandwidth. After
that, the performance of the system

is dependent on that bandwidth.
We try to ensure the experience is
equal, whether you're on a mobile
connection or a fat data pipe
sitting in London."
Going forward however, as
bandwidth restrictions ease,
solution providers expect more
market demand for moving high res
content instead of proxy workﬂows
in the cloud. "At some point, people
are going to do more editing directly
in the cloud," said Migliaccio.
Signiant expects a growing
number of people to not only
adopt cloud but to go 'cloud-ﬁrst'
as a win-win situation for both
parties. "The economies of scale
that vendors get when they offer
their softwares as SaaS are very
compelling," said Hamilton. "And
having an army of IT staff to manage
a software deployment on hardware
that you purchase and capitalise is
just not something that people are
interested anymore. There are very
few situations in which that actually
gives a broadcaster, production or
post-production company a real

Jay Migliaccio,
Director of Cloud
Platforms and
Services, Aspera

going
"...people areediting
to do more

"

directly in the cloud

competitive advantage."
All in all, cloud is fast becoming
an accepted part of the broadcast
production and post-production
workﬂow. "There are always going
to be the operational challenges
of system migration so it can take
a little time, but the momentum is
there," concludes Migliaccio.

SkyDrop is Signiant's hybrid SaaS solution for big files
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