NAB Show 2020 / COVID-19 Technology Round-Up
I’m writing this round-up today in commemoration of the dearly departed NAB Show 2020, as well as the successful completion of the first “virtual NAB” we’ve ever had with NAB Express just wrapping up. Due to the ongoing, worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, I have recently spent many, many hours on Zoom/Webex/GoToMeeting sessions listening to a variety of vendors speak about and demonstrate their remote/collaboration capabilities, which have essentially detoured product roadmaps (at least outwardly) in an attempt to garner your attention – as you work from home trying to keep some semblance of normalcy to your daily work routine alive. For anyone who cares, my Outlook calendar looks like a major motion picture timeline – and depending on your editorial tool of choice – varies only in the colors chosen for the video, effects and audio tracks. To say that the pandemic has impacted the way content is created is an understatement – and we are all collectively thinking about ways to productively keep things moving. The IABM organization has put together a great set of information and online sessions highlighting the impact on the industry with some leading manufacturers providing input. In case you missed it, you can check it out here. Another recent article by NewsCastStudio offers perspectives on the impact on spending and upgrade cycles from a good representation of broadcast manufacturers. Overall, I believe there will be substantial changes in workflows going forward – with many ultimately succumbing to the inevitable. Usage of “the cloud”, early on seen as an answer for some, but “not ready” for most, is now, at least in part, a requirement rather than a choice as virtual editing and production environments are popping up all over the place.
I’ve also recently spent hours speaking with both existing customers and prospects who were forced to cobble together solutions for remote work and/or collaboration in very short order at the onset of business closings due to the pandemic. My hat goes off to you – the technical people, who are not normally looked at as the “creative ones”, for coming up with so many interesting ways to get your facility and its users online and working from home. That being said, we are at a time when technology is truly capable of meeting the requirements of the day and manufacturers are indeed stepping up to the challenge – something I’m very glad about from my many days as a product manager…but deciphering all the descriptions, acronyms and buzzwords and distilling the core functionalities of solutions can be a bit daunting. I’ll try my best to keep things succinct and to the point in the summaries for the selected manufacturers (i.e. “cutting to the chase”). As always, please feel free to reach out to us to assist with any of the following solutions should you want more information or would like to meet with the manufacturer for a discussion and/or demo.
Amulet Hotkey:
Remote access to Mac Pro workstations has become a mission-critical requirement in the M&E space, and Amulet Hotkey can help with their DXT-H4 KVM Extender by delivering an incredible remote computing experience using the industry standard PCoIP protocol. The DXT-H4, when combined with a DXZ4 (zero) client device, provides highly secure remote connectivity to Mac Pro workstations.
For large (many user), enterprise environments with graphic intensive workflows, Amulet Hotkey has Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions that offer performance equal to physical workstations. With VDI, M&E IT teams can better align with budget targets while still focusing on innovation. In addition to the productivity gains for creative professionals, IT teams benefit from the following VDI capabilities:
- Easy onboarding of partners and contractors
- Centralized management of workstations
- Improved security controls
- Live migration capabilities of workstations, which eliminates business disruption during maintenance activities
More information on Amulet Hotkey’s CoreModule solution is available in a white paper here.
Avid Technology:
CIS Groups’ almost 30 year-long relationship with Avid continues and, like many other manufacturers, has explicitly chosen to not talk about new products/features they may have had queued up for NAB 2020 until later this year, unless they directly pertain to helping out with remote workflows and collaboration – which they have had in their products for some time, but now the spotlight is shining brightly on these features. Highlights include MediaCentral | Cloud UX for remote collaboration, Media Composer remote workflows with various helper tools (Teradici, HP RGS etc.) and their new Avid | Edit on Demand offering running on Microsoft Azure.
Rather than me trying to summarize everything Avid has available, I’ll instead point you directly to Avid’s website with a specific section dedicated to the insights and help they’re offering for remote working and collaboration in a variety of applications including broadcast, post and audio. Some highlights to check out include a series of guides here that outline exactly what you need in order to implement remote/collaborative workflows.
Avid VP of Americas Sales Matt Gharegozlou sums up his company’s experience and outlook so far, “Almost overnight the pandemic necessitated a massive shift in how our customers, from large enterprises to creative individuals, could stay at work to keep content pipelines flowing. The learning curve was as steep as you’ll ever see, but the corresponding problem-solving and innovation has been exceedingly rapid. It’s remarkably encouraging to realize just how quickly our community can learn and adapt. When the dust finally settles, we’ll have collectively redefined a new standard to ensure content creators that their workflows can remain accessible and on at all times.”
EditShare:
EditShare enables media professionals to easily collaborate on projects thanks to an ever-expanding range of innovative products and features – all designed to improve productivity and unleash creativity. Integration and collaboration are central to all solutions in their comprehensive product line, ranging from storage and media management solutions to ingest and archive.
EditShare also enables collaborative cloud-based media production with its newly announced virtualized video editing and storage platform – EFSv. Initially running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure, the open EFSv platform supports industry-standard third-party creative tools for editing, audio mixing, and grading with best-in-class security capabilities such as file auditing to propel secure, end-to-end editorial workflows in the cloud.
EFSv native drivers eliminate traditional IT bottlenecks and deliver superior performance in virtual environments. And, by leveraging the EditShare RESTful API, customers and technology partners can easily automate advanced storage management workflows. Everything, including project sharing, editing, and bin locking, is virtualized. Users can spin up an entire virtual facility in moments, with all the computing power they need to complete real-world projects in the cloud.
Commercially available today, EFSv packages include the workstation and GPU resources required to support teams of all sizes. The EFSv packages also include EditShare’s Flow media management and remote production workflow tools. Flow adds a control layer to virtualized storage pools, with tools to scan, log, search, and organize media, assemble story packages, and move content between object and block tiers of storage and also between cloud and on-premise tiers. Flow’s automation capabilities let users orchestrate redundant tasks and complex workflows, optimizing workflow efficiencies.
The flexible EditShare pricing structure provides customers transparency with options to purchase the EFSv subscription alone or inclusive of cloud services.
In addition to this new cloud-based offering, EditShare is also providing free Flow licenses from now until July 1, 2020, not only to their current customers, but to anyone working to simplify storytelling and keep communities connected.
Glookast:
GLOOKAST’s primary focus is to simplify the processes of capturing, ingesting, transforming, managing, and distributing digital media and metadata by orchestrating seamless collaborative workflows across diverse platforms, on-prem and/or in the cloud. The ultimate goal is to empower content producers and story tellers with the freedom to choose the tools they want, from the vendors they select, in order to get the user experience they desire.
Currently Glookast workflow optimization solutions are based on three product lines:
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- Media Producer – transcoding and remote ingest (deployable in the cloud or on-prem)
- Media Services – distributed media services for workflow optimization (deployable in the cloud or on-prem)
- Gloobox – feed ingest / play (HD/UHD/IP), loop recorder, auto-ingest & live events/sports control systems
During the past two years Glookast continued to expand its presence in North America, Europe, Middle East, and South Asia becoming a major player in remote/cloud transcoding, ingest and distributed media services as well as remote live production. Last but not least, Glookast solutions are now completely “ecosystem agnostic” with API-based integration with Adobe, Arvato VPMS, Arvato EditMate, Avid, EditShare Flow, Editshare QScan, File Catalyst, Object Matrix, Quantum, Spectra Logic (unique Archive and Production/Post workflows), and AWS with a growing list on the roadmap.
Worth noting is the new free SDK Glookast just launched, Media Gateway, which allows registered developers and customers to develop plugins that integrate Glookast products with all sorts of applications, such as:
- File Transfer Acceleration services (Aspera, Signiant)
- Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram)
- Messaging Services (Snapchat, WhatsApp, Teams)
- Storage Services (Dropbox, Box, One Drive)
- Streaming Services (YouTube, Vimeo)
- QC Audio/Video Processing Services
Clearly Glookast has managed to differentiate from all other vendors as far as remote ingest services are concerned. For some regions or companies where cloud adoption is still in early stages, Glookast offers public and private WAN-based remote services as they did in a recent project for a very large European network where news content is ingested from the Canary Islands to Madrid, with file acceleration and edit-while-ingest support (workflow diagrams below).
Conceptual workflows baseband – Islands to Madrid
Conceptual workflows filebase – Islands to Madrid
Filesbase workflow details – Islands
For More Information:
Object Matrix:
With a decade’s worth of experience having jointly implemented DR and Business Continuity systems into global broadcast and production environments, CIS Group’s partner Object Matrix is focused on providing solutions that enable creative and production teams to self-serve access to content from work or remotely from anywhere. Their customers are continuing to work from home thanks to intuitive applications and business continuity platforms built on award-winning object storage technology.
Object Matrix believes creative professionals working in environments that rely on legacy archive technology will always need assistance from people who should be doing more beneficial things for the business than fetch tapes from shelves in order to access content unless and until their environments are modernized. Modernization can include implementing an object storage-based archive in front of an existing LTO infrastructure that enhances the current environment, or perhaps ripping out the old technology completely and replacing it with an object storage-based private or hybrid cloud storage platform.
Object Matrix continues to help ensure creative professionals can self-serve to their heart’s content even in the event of a local outage (or Worldwide Pandemic). They are a strategic partner who understands the industry, enables global collaboration, increases operational efficiency and empowers creativity.
Spectra Logic:
Spectra Logic understands the digital archive challenges associated with media and entertainment. Together, with key industry partners, Spectra offers end-to-end workflow solutions. Spectra M&E solutions are backed by more than four decades of experience and emphasize ease of use, constant access to content and industry-leading density that can easily scale to millions of broadcast hours.
Spectra’s latest offering, StorCycle, is an easy-to-use, affordable and efficient storage management software solution built specifically to identify inactive data that consumes expensive primary storage capacity. It then migrates the identified data or entire projects, such as completed videos, to a more affordable protected tier of storage called the Perpetual Storage Tier, while leaving the data fully accessible to users. The Perpetual Storage Tier holds inactive data, which is tracked, protected and is available at a future time if needed. This tier is also used for data distribution, backup, archive, disaster recovery and more.
In addition to StorCycle software, Spectra provides a broad range of innovative data storage solutions that help media and entertainment organizations modernize their IT infrastructures so that they can meet the rigorous demands of today’s media workflows.
“In this massively disrupted landscape, where our customers in media and entertainment are facing new challenges and fierce competition, Spectra Logic is rising to the challenge of providing efficient, agile storage solutions that address current and future needs,” said Betsy Doughty, Spectra Vice President of Corporate Marketing. “Now more than ever, it’s important for businesses to partner with a vendor who has decades of experience in helping organizations optimize their infrastructures so they can better serve their users and monetize their assets.”
Resources:
Spectra Virtual NAB webinar
Spectra StorCycle for M & E white paper
TVU Networks:
TVU Networks is a global organization with more than 3,000 customers using its IP and cloud-based workflow solutions across multiple industries including news, entertainment media, sports, corporate, streaming, houses of worship and government. With the use of AI and automation driven technology, TVU helps broadcasters realize an efficient metadata and story-centric workflow through its MediaMind platform for live video content acquisition, indexing, production, distribution and management. The company has been on the forefront of developing the tools needed to revolutionize and streamline the Media Supply Chain. TVU is a critical part of the operations of many major media companies worldwide and is a Technology and Engineering Emmy® Award winner.
As a service to the broadcast industry and the larger community during COVID-19, TVU is offering cloud-based solutions and services to help organizations maintain business continuity. Through the end of May 2020, TVU is waiving fees for its remote broadcast reporting and production services which include the TVU Anywhere mobile app, TVU Grid for live video IP-based switching, routing and distribution and TVU Producer for cloud-based professional multi-camera live production. TVU is also assisting with the setup of video pool feeds for use between local government offices and all local TV stations for the fast and easy sharing of critical information with the public. For more information or to sign up, please visit www.tvunetworks.com.
Veset:
Veset develops and markets a pioneering software-as-a-service linear television management platform for media-content owners and service providers. Veset’s pay-as-you-go, self-service and all-in-one playout provides broadcasters, both large and small, with a quick, efficient and economical way of managing linear/live TV channels. While their goal is to reduce the total cost of operating a linear channel, Veset also delivers broadcast industry standards of reliability and security. In addition to delivering cloud technology innovation, Veset strives to bring the new business model of SaaS to the broadcast industry, by providing transparently priced, fixed monthly subscription for its playout services. Veset partners with best-in-class providers of broadcast solutions for connectivity and distribution of linear feeds worldwide.
– Written by Doug Hynes, Territory Account Manager NE USA