Category Archives: Video

Cloud Can Impact Almost Anything, As Same-Day Dailies for Movie Shoots Shows

Aframe, a cloud video production platform company, announced that Laboratory in New York used Aframe’s professional video management service to deliver dailies of the soon to debut indie film “The Birder’s Guide to Everything” literally the same day – a breakthrough for global film and TV production teams. In the fierce competition to achieve stunning creative, Aframe’s ability to ingest, store, transcode, and deliver a link to a full day’s high-res footage to a 20-person team, in just hours let the artists focus on their art. After years of teams tolerating the delivery of raw footage from location shoots via overnight shipments a day or two later, Aframe’s private cloud finally made the term “dailies” true to its name.

A quirky coming of age film featuring Academy Award winner Ben Kingsley, “The Birder’s Guide to Everything” is a feature-length adaptation of the 2008 short “Aquarium” by director Rob Meyer, which won an honorable mention from the Sundance Film Festival. After spotting what he thinks is an extinct duck, a high school sophomore and bird enthusiast persuades two dorky buddies and the “new girl in school” to join him on a quest to locate the mysterious bird. Adventure ensues as the teen comes to terms with painful aspects of his family life.

During 21 days of shooting north of New York City, post house Sixteen19 processed and uploaded dailies to Aframe where they would be securely stored and accessible to all authorized team members. Within hours, a link to an H264 proxy copy of the footage was emailed to 20 collaborators on the film. This avoided the costly, time consuming practice of shipping HD disks overnight would arrive the next day or later, often too late to make fine yet vital adjustments to potential for costly-reshoots.

Using Aframe, Laboratory now had an easy and efficient means for everyone to view each day’s raw footage and make important decisions on production or acting nuances immediately with the next day’s takes. Collaborators could access footage anywhere, anytime, without the need for dedicated, costly on-premises systems, with one co-producer even viewing dailies on his iPad while working in Qatar.

“I’ve been waiting for this type of solution for a decade, and to me Aframe is simply genius,” said Dean Winkler, co-founder of Laboratory and post-production and VFX supervisor for “Birder’s Guide.” “Digital storage is a huge problem, with everyone throwing valuable hard drives into some carton in an insecure back room, which are painful and time-consuming to sift through and store, let alone share. With Aframe, we store the master in a secure cloud and let everyone look at H264 proxies immediately and at their convenience – making better use of otherwise idle time and getting the footage out when it can make the greatest impact.”

“We’re creating this film on a tight budget, and Aframe not only saved us money distributing dailies but was also a far better solution than using physical media,” Winkler continued. “Once you use Aframe, I can’t imagine you’d ever want to go back.”

Video Guidance, SinglePath Partner for Video Conferencing

Video Guidance, a video conferencing company, has formed a partnership with Single Path, LLC, a Chicago-based provider of technology solutions and managed IT offerings to Illinois- and California-based businesses. The strategic partnership will help Video Guidance grow by increasing its sales presence in its current markets and expanding its geographic reach across Illinois and California.

Strategic partners help Video Guidance – through its cloud-based services — create a more visually collaborative workspace for its customers. In the last decade, Internet, mobile and broadband technologies have redefined our way of life, and visual communication tools have become critical to a business’ efficiencies. And in an era of dispersed teams and reduced travel budgets, enhanced, strategic collaboration and applications are essential to maximizing the benefits of today’s sophisticated technology.

“Our joint partnerships utilize and maximize resources to offer more comprehensive collaboration and visual services to businesses and organizations,” said Michael Werch, president of Video Guidance. “The program is designed to help value-added resellers (VARs) succeed in the highly lucrative video conferencing market, enabling them to take advantage of high-margin sales opportunities with our best-in-class video conferencing solutions.”


RAMP Announces MediaCloud Video Content Platform for SharePoint

RAMP announced today at the SharePoint Conference 2012 in Las Vegas the launch of MediaCloud™ for Microsoft® SharePoint®. RAMP’s MediaCloud for SharePoint combines RAMP’s award-winning solution for ingesting, indexing and publishing audio and video content with the largest enterprise content management platform in the world. Enterprise customers are now able to leverage SharePoint’s powerful collaboration and content management capabilities to publish, manage, and search audio and video content. Specific features of MediaCloud for SharePoint include:

  • Secure, cloud-based storage, transcoding, tagging, and streaming of
    video content to minimize IT complexity and cost.
  • Tight integration of video with SharePoint’s collaboration, content,
    search, and social features to increase the exposure and value of
    video across these core capabilities.
  • Comprehensive SharePoint web parts for integrated video search and
    video player for easy deployment and publishing of video content
    experiences.
  • Unique, patented technology to automate transcription and metadata
    generation on video content.
  • Deep in-video search and interactive video playback, enhancing
    discovery and engagement of video.

“Gartner has seen an explosion of interest from enterprises seeking to publish and manage video content as video becomes a ubiquitous form of communication,” according to Whit Andrews, Vice President at Garter Research. “The ability to leverage existing investments in collaboration and content management platforms such as Microsoft SharePoint is a critical factor in the ability to manage video at scale and cost effectively.”

“We are excited to build on our experience and success in managing large scale video requirements in the media industry to solve similar kinds of problems and opportunities now facing large enterprises,” said Tom Wilde, CEO RAMP. “Video is a complex and powerful medium, and our unique capabilities, combined with SharePoint’s expansive customer base give us a huge advantage in delivering value to a new set of customers.”


Google Fiber Has Far-reaching Implications

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...

Reading this post on Google’s low-cost, super-fast fiber-to-the-home initiative (makes me sort of wish I lived in Kansas City) brought to mind all the other Google products and initiatives that might be empowered by it. Go read it, then come back here and consider:

Chrome OS: it takes a long time to make a new operating system and it looks trivial today, but with widely available gigabit internet at the household and small business level it begins to look like a realistic “the network is the computer” future.

Mobile OS: Google already has that covered with Android.

Add Google Drive: Ubiquitous very high speed connectivity at a low price makes Drive viable for more than backup, sharing and synch. Actually synch becomes easier if the only copy is on a server.

Add Google Compute Engine: A thin-client netbook running Chrome OS, or Android on tablets and handsets, become more appealing if you  can quickly access network-based computing resources for high-performance computing tasks like video transcoding.

Add Google Voice: consider all those hypothetical hotspots. Combine with Android and Voice. Can a Google competitor to cell phone providers be far behind, one that leverages the coming Google network? All it would take is a couple extra capabilities in the fiber/WiFi box that seems inevitable. And don’t forget they now own Motorola, a top-notch mobile phone company.

YouTube/Google TV: Already dipping its toe into original programming, and fast fiber means TV will change dramatically.

Living In the cloud would become a real option for everyday consumers. What about effects on professionals and small businesses?

And what about those other seemingly sci-fi projects, self driving cars and Glass? Hey, if the car drives itself my brain then has the bandwidth for augmented reality. How might they benefit from the ability to hop from fiber-connected WiFi hotspot to hotspot?

All this based on a good search engine algorithm, and then ads next to search results? Who’d a thunk it?


Google Compute Engine and Cloud Video Transcoding — How Does it Compare?

Zencoder performed some initial comparison tests of Google Compute Engine versus Amazon EC2 for transfering and transcoding video.

“On EC2, we use Cluster Compute instances, which are fast dual-CPU machines in two sizes: 4XL and 8XL. We compared these with the fastest GCE instance type, which is currently a single-CPU 8-core server.”

Here’s one of their resulting charts:

Read the full post for details.