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Tweets of the week – 17 May 2013

Fri, 17 May 2013 14:57:00 -0000

Throughout the week, we scour the interwebs for interesting content for you, our loyal followers. Grab yourself a coffee and take 10 minutes to check out the top 5 things we've seen online over the past 7 days.

8 Reasons to be excited about 4K

Yet to be convinced by 4K? Not sure whether to upgrade your tech or change your existing workflows? TechRadar rounds up 8 reasons why you should get excited about 4K Ultra HD. From enabling glasses-free 3D to watching Wimbledon in 4K, if you’re still uncertain about its future, you might want to check your pulse.
Read article >>

You've never seen London like this: moving colour images from 1920s

Some amazing footage of our capital, London, in 1927, taken by one of the pioneers of colour film. Truly sensational stuff. We’d love to see someone recreate the same shots now for a side by side comparison of London then and now.
Read article >>

The Lighter Side Of The Cloud

It’s the internet buzzword of the last decade and yet some people still associate The Cloud with thunder and lightning. It’s not the most obvious source of humour, but these guys have had a commendable attempt at making a joke out of the fluffy stuff... Laugh your socks off. Or not.
Read article >>

RED Epic aerial footage

It’s been a week of 4K Ultra HD. There’s been some incredible stuff around – this is one of our two favourites. Some incredible aerial footage of San Francisco, taken with a 4K RED EPIC using a GSS C520 5-axis gyroscopic stabilization system, this is possibly the smoothest, most amazingly stable aerial footage you’ve ever seen
Read article >>

Super slow motion footage

4K video At 1,000 frames per second. It's an unwritten rule that everything is better in slow-motion. But there's a good chance your eyes aren't ready for the next level of awesomeness from Phantom's new Flex4K camera that can capture an astounding 1,000 frames per second at a resolution of 4096 x 2160. In other words? Every last detail captured in super, super, super slow-motion.
Read article >>

Global Entertainment Executives Join Aframe as Chairman & COO

Wed, 15 May 2013 13:34:00 -0000

Mike Hayes, Gary Knight and their track record in growing video game businesses to help transform Aframe from cool cloud computing start-up to media services powerhouse

LONDON and BOSTON, May 15, 2013 – Aframe has appointed two highly regarded executives from Sega Corporation to its management team. Mike Hayes, Aframe’s new Chairman of the Board, and Gary Knight, Aframe’s new Chief Operating Officer, together bring over 50 years of experience and successful track records in growing entertainment industry brands at Sega from innovative solutions to global giants.

At Aframe they will help structure a path from Aframe’s position today as a well-regarded, cool professional video industry start-up into a media services powerhouse. Both are based in Aframe’s London headquarters.

"Today, every company is a media company as video becomes easier to shoot and upload. Mike and Gary are exactly the people to help Aframe capitalize on its cloud computing network and seasoned staff so we achieve maximum growth,” said David Peto, Co-Founder and CEO of Aframe. “Already Mike and Gary have pointed the way to expanded markets and new opportunities to better serve our broadcasting and production customers. They’ve managed hyper-growth businesses before at one of the greatest innovators in the entertainment industry - and we’re eager to be their next great success story.”

Mike Hayes was formerly CEO of Sega Europe and Sega America and has taken some of the world’s most iconic brands from inception and launch to successful, profitable operations. Before Sega, Hayes ran sales and marketing for hit games publisher Codemasters, and was marketing director for Nintendo’s UK business unit. As Aframe’s chairman of the board, he now is applying his rather unique global management experience across creative, production, and publishing services business to help Aframe more rapidly identify and capture nascent growth opportunities.

Gary Knight was formerly Senior Vice President of Marketing for Sega, overseeing its global brand and content strategy and helping grow Sega from a 20-person startup to a household name with over 650 employees. Knight also formerly ran marketing for Electronic Arts where he grew the EA SPORTS brand into the highest annual market share in the gaming industry. At Aframe he now oversees UK & US sales operations, technology, finance, and marketing.

Aframe was founded by former post house executive David Peto in 2009 and debuted its triple-redundant, private cloud network in London in November 2010. Today, Aframe's solutions are used by the some of the most impressive names in the entertainment industry including BBC, MTV, the Shine Group, broadcaster Veria Living, major US and European TV broadcasters, production companies, corporate video departments, and advertising agencies.

Backed by a fresh VC round in April 2012, Aframe hired several founding members of the Avid Technologies team to lead its North American and engineering operations, and built a three-city, triple-redundant North American private cloud network and added a Boston area office.

In April 2013 Aframe launched its Aframe 2.0 version with an Edit Flow feature that represented a major step forward for the professional video industry - allowing multiple nonlinear editing formats to integrate seamlessly into a common cloud-enabled Aframe platform and in doing so, greatly streamlining the early stages of video productions.

Aframe 2.0 also is increasingly being used as a cloud-based MAM architecture to centralize a library of production and broadcast-ready video assets and supporting documentation. Its timecode extraction, metadata handling and export capabilities are features typically found in traditional on-premise media asset management solutions for many times the price.

Where is the best place to sit in a 4K UltraHD cinema?

Wed, 15 May 2013 11:14:00 -0000

When does 4K make a difference? It’s an important question for producers who may be wondering if it’s worth the added hassles and changes to workflow that this new technology brings. When is 4K too much?

We’ve written before how Sony have a lot riding on 4K. While other companies such as RED have pioneered the cameras and technology behind 4K, as the only end-to-end supplier in the industry it’s in Sony’s interests to really push it.

So, a couple of years ago they published a piece of research to advise cinemas upgrading to 4K projectors. It makes interesting reading.

In their words “Some have suggested that 4K is only meaningful for very large cinema screens. In fact, screen size isn’t the true measure of an audience member’s ability to pick out detail. The true measure is the relative distance from that person to the screen, the viewing distance. On paper, 4K is obviously the superior solution. But what about the real world? Will the ticket buying public actually be able to perceive the benefits of 4K resolution in actual theaters?”

Well they (naturally) argue that yes they would even in smaller cinemas, the reason being, it’s not the size of the screen that matter but the viewer’s position relative to it. If you’ve ever experienced an occasion when you’ve had to sit right at the front in a cinema, this (aside from the neck strain from having to stare upwards) is why the experience is so poor.

The science bit

There’s a generally accepted rule that the average person can “reliably” see 44 pixels per degree of vision. To quote Sony, this means:

“The most desired seats for the most enthusiastic ticket holders are roughly 1.5 Picture Heights from the screen. At this distance the viewing angel is 37 degrees. The relaxed reference of 44 pixels per degree multiplied by 37 degrees vertical equals 1628 pixels vertical.”

So, if your field of vision contains less pixels than this, you’re sat too close and you won’t see a seamless picture. And if you follow this calculation it suggests that, in many cases, the 1080 pixels picture height of 2K projection falls short of the 1628 pixels required to create a seamless picture. 4K’s picture height of 2048 pixels would.

But this shortfall varies according to viewing distance. As in the front row scenario, sit closer and the shortfall becomes more severe. Sit further away and the shortfall will diminish, eventually to zero – the distance at which the screen is so far away, the difference in pixels can no longer be seen. However in smaller cinemas, that rarely happens and in many cases, most of the seats in the cinema are too close.

What Sony suggest in their research is that there is a benefit even in the smallest cinemas as audience members can be much closer to the screen and still see the optimum number of pixels.

But what their research also illustrates is that the difference in quality from 4K really does depend on the situation. The size of the screen compared to the size of the auditorium, the keenness of the viewer’s eyesight and where they are sat in the auditorium all have some bearing on whether they can spot a difference of not.

And all this has some considerable bearing on the success of UltraHD in a home environment where, traditionally, the viewer sits relatively further away from the screen than they would at a cinema. To really benefit from 4K, they will either need to sit closer to the screen, or buy a bigger one. Are consumers going to be up for that?

Free eBook: Everything you need to know about video editing.

From considerations of what to take on location during the production period, to outlining the basic steps of the editing and post production process, the aim is to educate, innovate and inspire.

This 34 page exclusive eBook from Aframe explores:

Pre Edit Considerations
Getting to the Edit
Choosing an Edit System (Comparison)

Stepping into the Cutting Room
Organising Footage
Final Processes

Tweets of the week – 10 May 2013

Fri, 10 May 2013 09:28:00 -0000

Throughout the week, we scour the interwebs for interesting content for you, our loyal followers. Grab yourself a coffee and take 10 minutes to check out the top 5 things we've seen online over the past 7 days.

See Every Ray Harryhausen Creature in One Video

Ray Harryhausen passed away at the grand old age of 93 this week. Ray was a master of visual effects and his painstakingly hand-made and animated characters were a trademark of fantasy action films such as the Sinbad series, One Million Years B.C. and the original Clash of the Titans.
Read more >>

A Journey Through The Mail – From The Parcel’s Point Of View

A great film. Stick a hidden camera in a parcel. Put the parcel in the post to film what happens. Interesting. Are you still sending drives through the post..?
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BBC experiments with "surround" video

Two cameras, one with a standard lens and one with a fisheye lens, simultaneously shoot video. This is then shown using a TV and a projector creating an effect similar to the way the human eye works, with a central area with high definition and the surrounding vision at a lower resolution but we can see movement and colour. Microsoft have also been working on the same concept for the Xbox.
Read more >>

Problem Solving for Creative Professionals: What To Do When It All Goes Wrong

A great piece from PremiumBeat on what to do when ‘it’ hits the fan and your project begins to implode. Three thoughts to help when it all goes wrong.
Read more>>

Access the cloud with a BRCK

In places where blackouts are common and connections unreliable, accessing files stored remotely on the Internet can be tricky. The people behind Ushahidi, open disaster-mapping software, built BRCK (pronounced "brick"), a Wi-Fi router and mobile modem in one, with eight hours of battery life to keep it going when the power runs out.
Read more >>

Free eBook: Everything you need to know about video editing.

From considerations of what to take on location during the production period, to outlining the basic steps of the editing and post production process, the aim is to educate, innovate and inspire.

This 34 page exclusive eBook from Aframe explores:

Pre Edit Considerations
Getting to the Edit
Choosing an Edit System (Comparison)

Stepping into the Cutting Room
Organising Footage
Final Processes

What 4K Ultra HD means for video producers

Tue, 07 May 2013 13:34:00 -0000

2013 is proving to be the year of 4K. Manufacturers have begun to release the hardware which we saw being demonstrated at NAB Show where it was one the main topics of conversation.

Sony is one company that is massively behind it. As an article on TechRadar commented:

“Sony are the only company that can tell an on-brand end-to-end 4K story. It makes the movies and TV shows, it produces the cameras to shoot the content, it makes the projectors to display it in cinemas, it publishes the movies on disc, and it delivers it to the home in the form of TVs, games consoles and media servers”.

This week, it was revealed that Sony and the BBC will be trialling 4K at this year’s Wimbledon tennis tournament.

Panasonic are another major manufacturer firmly throwing their weight behind the format. Earlier this year they demoed a 4K tablet and used NAB Show to unveil a new range of 4K TVs and video cameras, all scheduled for launch by the end of the year, announcing "Everything we make in HD will be 4K.”

It’s clear that 4K Ultra HD is here to stay, so what does this mean for video producers?

Well, the biggest issue is size. 4K is bigger, much bigger, making it harder to store and harder to move.

The term 4K is based on the horizontal resolution of the format which is approximately 4,000 pixels. This is around 4 times the resolution of standard HD and results in a total resolution of around 8 megapixels per frame as opposed to 2 megapixels for HD.

Uncompressed, this means massive files. Just 2-3 minutes of 4k film – the length of a movie trailer – can be up to 500GB alone and, while standards were being settled, there were fears that the media would be simply too big to distribute. It's great to make good looking films, but kind of pointless if no-one can see them! However, recent tests using the newly ratified H.265 codec have produced impressive results; creating much smaller files requiring much less bandwidth to stream than expected. It means a 4K film could still fit on a BluRay disc or could be easily streamed through a standard cable connection.

So the issues with distribution appear to have been dealt with, however, the problems storing the original, uncompressed footage will remain.

This article from ZDNet gives some idea of the scale of the problem:

“If we want to use the digital workprint of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo as a benchmark, every single frame of the film is 45 Megabytes in size, and has an approximate resolution of 4352x2176.

The two hour and thirty-eight minute film has approximately 230,000 frames at 24 frames per second. If we do the somewhat inexact back of the envelope math, 45 megabytes per frame X 230,000 frames equals 10,350,000 Megabytes, or 10,107 Gigabytes, or just under 10TB.

That's what is needed to store a single 4K feature film shot at 24 frames per second, at full uncompressed workprint quality.”

That’s a lot of storage and that’s just the final, edited film. Considering shoot ratios for feature films are traditionally around 5 or 10:1 and that for documentaries or multi-cam reality shows, it can be as high as 500:1, that’s a serious amount of storage space needed for original footage. It's more than most companies can afford to buy and maintain and where cloud services, with scalable capacity, will really come into their own.

Free eBook: Everything you need to know about video editing.

From considerations of what to take on location during the production period, to outlining the basic steps of the editing and post production process, the aim is to educate, innovate and inspire.

This 34 page exclusive eBook from Aframe explores:

Pre Edit Considerations
Getting to the Edit
Choosing an Edit System (Comparison)

Stepping into the Cutting Room
Organising Footage
Final Processes

Tweets of the week – 3 May 2013

Fri, 03 May 2013 10:38:00 -0000

Throughout the week, we scour the interwebs for interesting content for you, our loyal followers. Grab yourself a coffee and take 10 minutes to check out the top 5 things we've seen online over the past 7 days.

The smallest film in the world

This week IBM released a film made using atoms. A Boy And His Atom is a 250 frame, 1 minute long animation that was made by nanophysicists moving individual atoms on the surface of a piece of copper. It’s an offshoot of their research into using atomic memory to create the next generation of data storage devices with massive capacity. Film and data storage together at last?! This had to be the Aframe story of the week!
Read more >>

6 forums for video professionals

A great list from PremiumBeat.com. Knowing where to look for the solutions to your artistic, technical and creative career problems is half the battle to finding the solution you need. These forums may have the answer.
Read more >>

Metallica turn it up to 11 in 3D

A stunning photo gallery of the filming of a Metallica gig in Vancouver for 3D concert movie ‘Metallica Through The Never’, directed by Nimród Antal and due for release later this year. The concert itself is a classic piece of understated rock showmanship featuring explosions, floating coffins and a great many men of a certain age doing ‘horn of the devil’ hand gestures.
Read more >>

6 reasons businesses need video

An interesting piece from production house fortyfoursixteen on why video is such an effective communication tool for businesses.
Read more>>

4K passes tipping point. The revolution has happened

4k – not the next 3D. That’s the view of RedShark editor, Dave Shapton who writes on why he thinks there’s more to 4K than just another ploy by manufacturers to shift more hardware.
Read more >>

Free eBook: Everything you need to know about video editing.

From considerations of what to take on location during the production period, to outlining the basic steps of the editing and post production process, the aim is to educate, innovate and inspire.

This 34 page exclusive eBook from Aframe explores:

Pre Edit Considerations
Getting to the Edit
Choosing an Edit System (Comparison)

Stepping into the Cutting Room
Organising Footage
Final Processes

[Slide Deck] Just What is Aframe?!

Thu, 02 May 2013 10:58:00 -0000

Being a cloud-video-asset-management-software-service-with-API-platform isn't as easy to explain as you might think, you know.

So to answer that age old question, 'What does Aframe, you know, do?', we've created this handy slide deck to tell you, you know, what we do. Here it is...

What is Aframe? from Aframe

Free eBook: Everything you need to know about video editing.

From considerations of what to take on location during the production period, to outlining the basic steps of the editing and post production process, the aim is to educate, innovate and inspire.

This 34 page exclusive eBook from Aframe explores:

Pre Edit Considerations
Getting to the Edit
Choosing an Edit System (Comparison)

Stepping into the Cutting Room
Organising Footage
Final Processes

6 reasons why the Cloud beats in-house systems

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 10:28:00 -0000

Flexibility

Cloud services can be upgraded or downgraded, started or suspended according to requirements. Say you have an unusually large project that requires more storage or functionality than you usually use, that’s no problem. You can just increase what you use to meet your needs at that time (you certainly can with Aframe). If you no longer need a service, that’s also no problem – you can just cancel the service.

When setting up in-house, hardware and software have to be bought and set up but you’re then stuck with them whether you still need them or not – servers, racks, software can sit unused, gathering dust. And it’s not often possible or quick to boost systems on a temporary basis.

Access

Whether cloud services use browser based interfaces or their own applications, because the data is stored in the cloud it can be accessed by anyone from any location (providing they have the right access permissions).

In-house, hardware tends to be sat within a restricted access network environment. Data is stored on local hard drives meaning it can only be accessed from that specific computer, or has to be carried around on portable drives. Even if there are networked drives, you still have to be within the network to get to the files.

Maintenance

When you subscribe to a cloud service, you are also buying the support and maintenance required to keep it running. This is great from your point of view as it puts all the responsibility on the vendor. Quite simply, it’s crucial to our business that our customers can always access our service 24/7 – if they couldn’t then they would stop using us – so we invest a lot of time and effort into ensuring that happens.

In-house, that responsibility rests with you. You need to take care of the maintenance of your systems and often this means you have to invest in support teams or buy in support from outside. All of this is on top of the initial investments in equipment and software you’ve already made.

Security and backup

Like all cloud service providers, we’ve invested in robust, failsafe back-up systems to ensure your data is always safe and we demonstrate that commitment with our service level agreements. And of course, we’ve put in a lot of effort to ensure our datacenters are as secure as possible (so secure we’ve recently been recognised by FACT).

When your systems are in-house, it’s your responsibility to ensure they are secure and robustly backed up. Again, this means further costs on top of your initial investments and more time and resources.

Upgrades and development

Our business depends on us being able to offer services that don’t just meet but exceed the expectations of our customers. So our developers are constantly working on Aframe – updating it to meet the evolving needs of video technology and designing and building new features (such as our upcoming Logger app) to make it even better. And we’re constantly investing in new and better hardware in our datacenters.

Upgrading in-house systems can be a long and costly business and it often just doesn’t happen. Even when it does, it may only be on an annual basis as new budgets become available or IT teams wait until the initial batch of post-launch bugs are addressed by the vendors. And then there’s the hassle of ensuring new versions work with your legacy systems.

Cost

The over-riding theme throughout these points is the difference in cost. Compared to setting up your own in-house solution, cloud services are always significantly more cost effective – it’s why so many businesses are moving to these kind of services.

Free eBook: Everything you need to know about video editing.

From considerations of what to take on location during the production period, to outlining the basic steps of the editing and post production process, the aim is to educate, innovate and inspire.

This 34 page exclusive eBook from Aframe explores:

Pre Edit Considerations
Getting to the Edit
Choosing an Edit System (Comparison)

Stepping into the Cutting Room
Organising Footage
Final Processes

What’s Next for the Trade Show?

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 12:33:00 -0000

We've written before about our feelings about trade shows. As we asked then, in this day and age of webinars, online video conferencing and downloadable product demonstrations, is there still a need for expensive and time-consuming live events?

We'd have to say yes. But not as we know them.

We’re just back from one of the biggest TV industry trade shows, NAB (the National Association of Broadcasters) in Las Vegas.

Why do we go?

Because traditionally, personal relationships have always been very important in the media business. Whether it's commissioning new projects or buying new hardware, deals have always been made face to face – not surprising when you consider the huge potential costs of both. And when that much money is being invested, personal relationships – whether you can work with someone or not – matter a great deal.

Therefore technology companies gear up to sell in this way as that's what the customer expects. Hence, big stands, direct sales teams and trade shows – and if you're not there, you'll lose out to someone who is.

The move to instant on-demand cloud services has drastically reduced the risk element for purchases a buyer makes. If it no longer meets your needs, you can easily move on to something that does and your initial investment has been quite small. It's low cost and low risk so people don't have to be so cautious.

That said, from a buyer's point of view, there is still a great deal to be gained from being able to sit down and talk to a vendor, to fully understand a service and to discuss how it can meet your specific needs. And to be able to do that with all the relevant vendors in one place is obviously an advantage.

And from the point of view of us a vendor, it's much the same. To be able to discuss a client's needs and show them how Aframe can meet them is very valuable. We know how others are using Aframe so can often provide people with some further insight into how Aframe can help them. And again, to be able to do that with dozens of people over a few days is great value for money.

But for buyers and vendors, trade shows are now about so much more than just turning up and giving out/picking up promotional pens. As ever, the NAB Show was rammed with thousands of visitors and hundreds of exhibitors and it still seems a pretty healthy event. But, like all expos, they have had to adapt their model and provide more than just sales booths. Networking events, conferences, VIP attendees, social 'get-togethers' – inspired by tech shows like South by Southwest, NAB Show is becoming more and more in tune with the needs and wants of the client.

If they continue with this, then there is great hope for their future. Aframe will look at attending them all, for exactly these things – to meet new people, to learn and understand new trends and to see new stuff.

Edit Flow comes to the NAB Show 2013

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 09:22:00 -0000

We were particularly excited about NAB Show 2013 as it gave us a great opportunity to show off the load of new features in Aframe 2.0.

The core of these is Edit Flow™, a new workflow tool we've introduced into Aframe which lets anyone view, organise and comment on footage, from any desktop in the world, before transferring the metadata to Media Composer, Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere for fast and streamlined editing.

You can watch our Product Specialist, Rory McVicar, give a run through of Edit Flow from our booth at the NAB Show 2013.

Learn more about Aframe Edit Flow:

3 Big Trends from NAB Show 2013

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 17:10:00 -0000

Every year, Las Vegas plays host to the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Conference and Exhibition better known as the NAB Show. It’s the world’s largest and most important TV and video industry trade show and this year was the second time we’ve exhibited there.

As we say, like everything in Vegas, NAB Show is big – really big. Over 1,500 companies exhibited this year in the 800,000 square feet Las Vegas Convention Center and the event was attended by over 90,000 media and entertainment pros from around the world.

After a bit of a hectic start, once things were set up and the real business began we had a great week.

For us the challenge is to stand out in a crowded environment, something we managed to do first and foremost by having a good product that a lot people were interested in. The industry knows that cloud services are the future for tv and video production and so Aframe is naturally of interest to a lot of people.

Having good coffee and being one of only a handful of companies giving away promotional bags simply added to attraction of the Aframe booth.

Loads of companies were there demoing new services, products and technology. There’s a lot to see but here’s the 3 big trends we noticed this year.

1. 4K and Ultra HD TV

You couldn’t go anywhere at NABShow without hearing 4K and Ultra HD (UHDTV) being talked about. As well as being the subject of some of the panels and discussions there was loads of hardware on display too as the likes of Sony unveiled their new 4K displays. Sure, $5,000 is a lot of money for a telly (although it’s a lot less than Samsung’s whopping £40k 85-incher) but as a starting point for a new technology it’s not bad.

While all this talk was going on, Japanese broadcaster NHK chose the NAB Show to give the first demo outside of Japan of 8K technology and revealed it is looking to begin trial 8K satellite broadcasts in 2016.

UHDTVs need UHDTV content and production companies will need to have a good look at their technical capacity to handle video files of this size.

2. The Continued Rise of The Cloud

Cloud computing was the subject of its own 2 day conference at NAB as people discussed the benefits of using cloud services for video production. As we know so well, the benefits of using the cloud for media projects and post production workflow are enormous. The interest in Aframe and conversations we had over the week showed that the industry knows that cloud asset management isn't just the future – it’s here now. With the demands of 4K and ultra HD becoming a reality soon, the flexibility and capacity that cloud technologies can bring is becoming more and more important.

3. Is Second Screen Here to Stay?

The buzz phrase at this year’s show. Second screen is the idea that people tend more and more to be multitasking while they watch TV, using phones, tablets or laptops to tweet or chat about what they’re watching.

For broadcasters and content creators the challenge is to try and find ways to benefit from the second screen. The Second Screen afternoon conference saw presentations and discussions with a number of companies who are working on just that with approaches including developing apps to accompany shows, social games and integration with social media platforms like Twitter. How successful these have been so far is questionable with a recent survey suggesting viewers have yet to buy in to the idea - but it’s clearly not going to go away.

About Aframe

Aframe's cloud video technology helps people connect and collaborate, making them more productive and improving execution in their video projects.
The ability to access high resolution rushes and production footage from anywhere in the world via a web browser enables companies to save time, money and focus on producing better video.

Who'd be a Production Manager?

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 22:58:00 -0000

The life of the Production Manager on a shoot can’t be that different to that of the Marketing Manager at a trade show. Despite weeks if not months of careful planning, crossing every t and dotting every i you can think of, something will always endeavour to go wrong on the big day.

For me, it’s all gone a bit ‘tits up’ at this year’s NAB Show. I'm writing this blog, in the middle of what closely resembles a warzone, next to our booth which is being dismantled and moved 5 metres because it was erected in the wrong location. We also have no power, no internet connectivity (fairly critical for a company like Aframe!), no audio visual equipment and no refreshments for the many prospective customers that will be visiting us in a little under 24 hours. To cap it all, our company name on our booth graphics has a typo!

It must be similar to how a Production Manager feels during a hectic shoot. Worrying about going over budget after spending money you don’t have on additional hard drives because the shoot ratio turned out way higher than was planned. Or fretting over whether there was enough logging to ensure that the mountain of footage can be indexed and searched. Panicking when the carefully planned tape labelling system (that was agreed, communicated and double checked before the shoot began) has now mysteriously been replaced with a strange hybrid system, which only the runner can understand.

Perhaps the most frustrating disasters Production Managers experience are technical. Partly because technical problems are so unfathomable to most people, never mind resolve, when technical goes bad, it tends to go bad BIG TIME. FTP headaches as you wait for the progress bar to move just a millimetre in the right direction. Your producer literally turning the air blue screaming at you because the file format you sent for review won’t play on her machine. Realising after 3 weeks of solid filming, that nobody remembered to give the 10 different cameras, 10 different names, resulting in lots of very similar file names...

Problems like these are no easy task for anyone to rectify. So the next time you feel that everything is going wrong, spare a thought for the poor Production Manager who everyone is relying on to get the show back on the road. And if you are not in video production, spare a though for the poor beleaguered Marketing Manager!

Free eBook: Tapeless 101 - Getting Started with Digital Video

Like many other great technology shifts, tapeless can be a wonderful thing. Among a myriad of other benefits, it brings speed and efficiency to the world of video production. And with speed comes cost savings..

This 14 page exclusive eBook from Aframe explores:

Managing technology on a shoot
The advantages (and the disadvantages) of file based production

Top tips for a successful switch to digital production
How to choose a camera
Managing tapeless cards and drives

5 Different Ways to Use Corporate Video

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 10:58:00 -0000

For brands and businesses, video is becoming an increasingly common and important part of the communications mix. Channels are increasing and are easy to use.

Whether it’s for external use – advertising, branded content, corporate communications, sales presentations, customer service – or internal – training, internal communications, presentations – the use of video is on the rise. It’s social, interactive, mobile, profitable, trackable and brandable.

Of course, not all videos produced by corporates are great. Some are awful, some just plain boring (it’s debatable which is worse. At least an awful one has a chance of going viral).

The best corporate videos reflect and project the brand or communicate a message in such a way that the audience engages with it.

For recruitment, video is a great tool to tell people about company culture in a far more engaging way. On average, employer customers receive a 34% greater candidate application rate when they add video to their job postings. It also provides a way to put across a complicated message in an ‘easy to swallow’ and more captivating format – 5 pages of website content can be covered in a 3 minute video.

Here’s five types of corporate video that we think stand out in the world of corporate film.

1.The Brand Video

Ok, so this type of video is fairly common nowadays, however they're not all successful. The best corporate videos reflect and project the brand in such a way that the audience engages with it. They have to be consistent with the brand, but try and offer a new perspective to surprise those members of the audience who think they know it already and most of all be interesting.

They should try and not be a brochure, although they often are. The company should be trying to put its best message forward, with the highest possible production values to enhance, dress up and show off that message.

London corporate communications agency Radley Yeldar benefit from having the creative skills in-house to be able to create something a cut above the rest, but it’s a great example of a video that’s engaging but still explains what they do and who they’ve done it for.

2.The Recruitment Video

Video is the perfect channel for recruitment. It’s a very simple way to get the personality and culture of a company across. The ‘talking head’ is the most common approach – an employee describes a day in their life, how their career has been progressed and what a great place Company X is to work. Rackspace have taken a slightly different approach with a series of video showing “A Day in the Life” at Rackspace. The one below is very simple – there’s no voiceover, the pictures do the talking. Of course, how typical this day was is open to question – there can’t be weddings in the office too often.

3.The Issues Video

For companies who need to get across complicated messages, a video can be an effective tool. Whatever your feelings about the products it makes, there’s no denying that the tobacco industry has some serious issues it needs to engage on. British American Tobacco made a feature film style video outlining their views on the issue of counterfeit and smuggled tobacco. You may not agree with their views and the style is pretty corny (dodgy accents alert!), but there’s no denying it stands out as a corporate video.

4.The Reputational Video

For BP, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was a reputational disaster as well as an environmental one. After some awful PR errors in the first few days, social media (including video) played a huge part of their crisis management strategy. Video continues to play an enormous part in this ongoing reputation management campaign; it's not simply a case of posting out a single video hoping everything will go away. Their YouTube channel features a playlist called “BP's Commitment to the Gulf“ which has a total of 96 videos in it.

5.The Sustainability Video

Sustainability and environmental impact is a huge issue for major corporates. The issues can be complicated but it’s important for companies to make sure people understand what they are doing to minimise the impact their business has on the environment.

Unilever’s 5 Levers for Change initiative is part of their ongoing Sustainable Living Plan – their attempt towards sustainability. It’s a fun piece of animation that explains the concept succinctly.

Free eBook: Everything you need to know about video editing.

From considerations of what to take on location during the production period, to outlining the basic steps of the editing and post production process, the aim is to educate, innovate and inspire.

This 34 page exclusive eBook from Aframe explores:

Pre Edit Considerations
Getting to the Edit
Choosing an Edit System (Comparison)

Stepping into the Cutting Room
Organising Footage
Final Processes

8 Myths About Cloud Computing for Video Professionals

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 15:42:00 -0000

1. The Cloud is just a fad

Definitely not.

With the rise of mobile computing through smartphones and tablets, and ever-improving internet connections, people are no longer tied to one desktop computer at their home or office. Developers recognised people now needed to be able use their software or access their information from any device.

As a result, more and more services and software are cloud-based. Email is most likely the first cloud-based service you’ve used with the likes of Hotmail and Gmail. Now the cloud is used to provide all manner of tools and services from simple things such as calendars and task management (Milk, Evernote, Google Calendar), through to more complex file storage and collaboration tools (Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud), and full on productivity packages such as the Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps. And that’s not to mention the specialist marketing, finance and HR tools increasingly being used by businesses. And of course, video production tools.

The cloud is not a fad. The cloud is here to stay.

2. The Cloud isn’t secure

These days, security is always a major concern - your files and data are important and users need to know their cloud services are secure. Most reputable cloud service providers will employ the same online security measures as banks use to handle your money. But it's always worth checking if you want peace of mind.

For critical data, make sure services are using secure connections (look out for the padlock icon or 'https' in your browser’s address bar) and check their website to see if they explain what other steps they take. To see how we compare, check out our security page.

3. The Cloud is unreliable

Cloud-services are usually hosted on multiple servers in multiple locations which share the load. It means outages are very, very rare because if there is a problem with one server, users are seamlessly routed to another. Aframe has maintained 100% uptime since launch thanks to this set up.

Only the largest organisations can afford this kind of set up in-house as it's a hugely expensive overhead to set up and manage. For most businesses, the cloud can bring much more reliability than you may be used to as well as a whole host of other benefits.

4. Performance is worse in the Cloud

Cloud-based services usually run on systems set up specifically to provide that service. They’re fast, can be easily maintained and the cloud setup means servers can be upgraded quickly and easily to keep up with increasing demand. As long as your internet connection is reliable, you’ll probably not even notice the difference from working offline.

5. Its better value to invest in equipment and software than Cloud services

Buying equipment and software means making an ongoing financial commitment to maintenance, upgrades and replacements. And that’s money you don’t get much return on – hardware and software aren’t assets that retain value. It can also leave you stuck with something you find you no longer need. Subscribing to cloud services means you don’t need to worry about any of this. Hardware is not your problem and you can usually scale your use according to what you need.

6. Cloud computing isn’t for enterprise

Cloud computing is being increasingly used by enterprise-scale businesses as their IT needs become more and more complicated. For one thing, it gives them more flexibility – services can be upgraded or downgraded according to requirements. It also means services can be swapped much more quickly if they are no longer suitable. And there’s increasing savings to be made by letting specialist teams look after specialist services, rather than investing in-house specialist teams.

7. I need a really fast internet connection to use the Cloud

No. Cloud services are designed to deal with the lowest common denominator and as long as you have a standard broadband connection, they will work. Of course if you need to move big files around, the faster your connection the better, but tools like Aframe’s Uploader will make the best of what’s available.

8. I need an IT team to start working in the cloud

One of the main advantages of cloud-services is that all you need to use them is an internet connection. There’s very little need for IT expertise – that’s what the service provider is there for.

Free eBook: Tapeless 101 - Getting Started with Digital Video

This 14 page exclusive eBook from Aframe explores:

Managing technology on a shoot
The advantages (and the disadvantages) of file based production

Top tips for a successful switch to digital production
How to choose a camera
Managing tapeless cards and drives

The Ultimate Guide to Video Formats

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 14:24:00 -0000

For the uninitiated, video formats can be a cause of some confusion. And they can also be the root of holdups and delays when trying to get feedback from clients and colleagues involved in a production.

So what’s the problem? Well, a video format is basically made up of two elements – a container and a codec. The same container can use different codecs (and, conversely, the same codec can be used by different containers) and this is often the cause of confusion. How many times have you heard clients say they’ve been able to play an MP4 file before but the one you sent them doesn’t work? This is often caused by problems with codecs.

What is a codec?

Codecs are a method for making video smaller.

Outside of a professional environment, video needs to be compressed to be able to use it. Digital video is just data like any other file, but the average blu-ray film can be up to 50GB in size – way too much for most people to be able to download, share or store locally. To get around this, the files have to be made smaller and this is where the codecs come in.

Using software, video is processed using the codec which, through various techniques and algorithms, compresses the data to create a smaller file. This usually comes with a loss of picture and sound quality because the lower the quality, the smaller the file size. If you’re just looking at the result on a computer screen or through a website this is usually fine but the trick of compression is finding an acceptable balance between loss of quality and acceptable file size.

Once the file has been compressed using a particular codec, the same codec needs to be used to play it. This is where clients and colleagues can often have problems. Windows and Mac computers come with many of these codecs pre-installed but updated and new codecs are released all the time and these often don’t make it to everyone, especially in corporate environments. Without the correct codec on their machine, the video player software they have will not be able to interpret the file.

Some examples of codecs that you may have heard of include DivX, FFmpeg, x264 and WMV but there are lots of different ones in use.

So what’s the container?

A container is a way of bundling together the various elements of a video into one file.

The elements will include a video codec and an audio codec, plus things like subtitles, chapter information and metadata. Because they are separated like this, containers mean you can use one codec for your video and one for your audio. This gives you the flexibility to make files smaller by using lower quality sound but retain a certain amount of visual quality.

Popular containers include AVI, MKV, MP4 (used by Apple in the iTunes Store) and MOV (which was created by Apple and is the native format for Quicktime).

The difference between containers is to do with how they support different features like subtitles or chapters, rather than the codec they use. As we said earlier, different containers can use the same codecs.

Avoiding issues

If you’re sending video to clients, it’s obviously best to use a format that is most commonly supported. The H.264 codec is supported by Windows and Mac OS and is used for delivering Web video. Using a MP4 container means it’ll work on just about anything including tablets and smartphones.

Alternatively, Aframe’s video platform makes the process of producing and sharing video even easier.

Free eBook: Tapeless 101 - Getting Started with Digital Video

This 14 page exclusive eBook from Aframe explores:

Managing technology on a shoot
The advantages (and the disadvantages) of file based production

Top tips for a successful switch to digital production
How to choose a camera
Managing tapeless cards and drives

How Collaboration Tools Can Help Production Managers

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 15:57:00 -0000

Cloud services and social media are already a part of everyday life for many people. You'll undoubtedly have heard of them. You're probably already using them. But how useful are they for video productions? How can they help collaboration? And how can they help you stay in control, on schedule and under budget?

Media production is a team effort driven by collaboration, but when crews are split between multiple locations and offices, it can be hard to stay connected. That lack of connection can mean people are in the dark, which in turn can lead to delays, expense and missed deadlines.

The hardest part of the Production Manager's job can be trying to keep track of what's going on. You have questions, your crew have questions, and the answers haven't always been easy to find.

Until now!

Let the power of the cloud and its Social Media Superstars help you be the best Production Manager

Where's the latest schedule?

Making sure everyone's on the same page can be difficult. On large projects, reaching decisions can take a lot of discussion, a lot of emails and many different drafts of a document. Which is the current one? One crew member using an outdated document can cause delays, costing time and money.

Cloud tools like Google Drive mean you can put documents where any of your crew can access them and you no longer have to spend time triple-checking that everyone is using the right version. They can get to them wherever they are and you can easily keep things organised. Your cloud-based production tool should make collaboration even easier by keeping your documents in the same place as your footage.

How's it looking?

As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Get your crew to use tools like Instagram and Facebook to instantly share photos or short bits of video of what's going on. Everyone involved can see what's happening, they can feel like they are still connected with the project and most importantly, they are kept up to speed.

Where is everyone?

Instant messaging tools such as BlackBerry Messenger and WhatsApp? are a great way of keeping in touch with your crews. Like text, you can send quick, short messages that are more immediate than email. But the advantage they have over text is that they let you have group discussions. You can send a message to several people and they can all see each others' responses. You can also send links, photos and short video through them. Again, your cloud video software should enable you to talk to teammates about specific clips and even apply those comments to the timecode.

What do you think?

Getting everyone's feedback on that day's shooting can be an incredibly slow and inefficient process. Using a cloud-based collaboration tool (like Aframe) means your film can be quickly sent to a central place. Everyone who needs to can then access it and leave their comments. Those comments can then be seen by everyone else, which can fire creativity – rather than commenting in isolation, suddenly there's collaboration. It's quicker than couriers and more reliable than FTP and it cuts down the usual delays experienced while you wait to collect, collate and distribute everyone's feedback.

At a time when budgets are tight, it's more and more essential for production managers to keep a tight rein on their projects. Keep everything central and your creative team can make decisions quicker and with more accurate information.

Time is saved. Budgets are saved.

Keep it all in the cloud.

Free eBook: Everything you need to know about video editing.

From considerations of what to take on location during the production period, to outlining the basic steps of the editing and post production process, the aim is to educate, innovate and inspire.

This 34 page exclusive eBook from Aframe explores:

Pre Edit Considerations
Getting to the Edit
Choosing an Edit System (Comparison)

Stepping into the Cutting Room
Organising Footage
Final Processes

Great Video Editing Means Getting Organized

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 12:04:00 -0000

Video editing is a serious business. It can mean the difference between a great production and a flop. Great editing brings content to life and brings order to the chaos of production. But what can the rest of the production team do to make the final editing process, well, great? Getting organised is a good place to start…

Regardless of the kind of video you are producing, it is essential to shoot the right footage to achieve effective post production. Too often, projects turn up compromised in the edit because of poor audio or lighting or as a result of poor planning. To avoid this, an in-depth pre-production process is recommended to achieve a well-organised production. If you maintain an organised shoot, you will have an organised editing room.

It is extremely important to know where the production is going before setting out, ensuring the crew is on the same page. Not having enough footage to choose from in the edit can seriously harm the finished production, so it is always better to overshoot rather than leave the editor short changed. The edit needs a range of shots to choose from, as well as accurately labelled rushes and a log sheet containing detailed information on the material.

With so many options available on the market, deciding which video editing software to use can be daunting. However for video editing professionals, it’s a choice between three main applications:

Adobe Premiere
Avid Media Composer
Apple Final Cut Pro

Good editing software is not only expensive but it also relies on a high-spec and high-priced computer to power the software to its full potential. So it is always worth updating whichever computer the software will run on if it’s not up to the job.

Once the software has been chosen, learn as many shortcuts, effects and colouring tools as possible. This information will prove extremely useful when the edit begins and make the process that more efficient.

Free eBook: Everything you need to know about video editing.

From considerations of what to take on location during the production period, to outlining the basic steps of the editing and post production process, the aim is to educate, innovate and inspire.

This 34 page exclusive eBook from Aframe explores:

Pre Edit Considerations
Getting to the Edit
Choosing an Edit System (Comparison)

Stepping into the Cutting Room
Organising Footage
Final Processes

#NAB2013: The Exhibitor’s Guide to Surviving a Trade Show

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 15:25:00 -0000

Trade shows are an ordeal.

Trade shows can be the very definition of “work hard, play hard”. But they are a priceless opportunity to get your product out there, get known, make contacts and, most importantly, generate leads and sales. It’s tough but incredibly worthwhile and that's why we’re going back to Las Vegas this year.

This year is the second time Aframe will be at NAB Show but we’re all hardened expo veterans. We’ve been there, done that and got the promotional T-shirt, pen and stress ball. We’ve got the experience and the scars – mental and physical.

Here’s our tips to surviving a trade show.

1. Be ready for business

No matter how quiet it is, don't sit down, don’t play with your phone, don’t stand in a group chatting. Your next potential lead could walk by at any moment and if they don’t think you’re available for a chat, they’ll walk on past. Stay looking active and alert. It’s a good idea to have a plan for how you’ll try and generate traffic when the stand goes quiet.

2. Make your booth stand out

In a sea of hundreds of booths, you need to stand out. Not everyone has Adobe sized pockets but you can still make an impression on a small budget. Have strong branding, make sure everything is integrated and smart. Make sure your demo laptops have clean and branded desktops and screensavers. Try and do something that makes you stand out from the crowd.

3. Be distinctive

Being distinctive doesn’t just end at the stand. Our orange and black Aframe shirts may not be what we’d wear through choice, but they catch the eye and we get remembered. Our CEO, David, was recently talking to a journalist who remembered the Aframe shirts at NAB2012. For a small company in a big show, that kind of recognition is all important. Anything that makes your product more memorable to leads who’ve spent all day talking to people is helpful. With such a tight schedule, chances are you'll end up wearing them to social events too which just helps make you all the more memorable.

4. It’s 24 hours

Business doesn’t end when the show closes. Some of the best sales are done off the show floor over dinner and drinks. Evening social events are an opportunity to meet more leads and chat in more relaxed circumstances. And make sure you have a process in place to follow up with any leads you get. Once you have a lead you need to keep it. Hit them with an email or follow up call as soon as you can.

5. Be kind to your feet

Wear comfortable shoes. When you’re at a fair you'll walk for miles and stand forever. If you normally spend your day sitting at a desk, you'll be very quickly reminded just how little time you spend on your feet these days. It’s surprising how tiring it is so wear your most comfortable-yet-suitably-smart shoes. This is not the time to be breaking in a nice, new pair of shiny leather brogues.

6. Fuel up

Have a big breakfast. There will be no time for lunch and there is NOTHING worse than someone eating their sandwiches on the stand. It looks messy and you can’t answer a question with a face full of meatball sub.

7. Keep your water up

You’ll be standing all day in a large air-conditioned conference hall (hopefully) talking to people all day. OK, it’s not running a marathon, but you can still end up surprisingly dehydrated. Make sure you drink plenty of water. Don’t mainline coffee all day – that just adds to the dehydration (and gives you unappealing breath issues!).

8. Beat the lull

The final afternoon at a trade show can be deathly. Delegates are already heading home, your energy is low, you already have a large stack of new leads - it’s very easy to ease off. But there’s still business to be done. Have a plan for generating traffic from the last remaining delegates and try and get those final leads. It may be time to do something attention-grabbing!

9. Get social

You can bet that the majority of delegates will be tweeting, facebooking and linking-in from the show, so make sure you do too. Make sure they know you’re there. Post pics, comments, make sure you use the official hashtag and be part of the event conversations. Mention other exhibitors and hopefully they’ll mention you back, putting you in front of their followers. It shows you’re active and it also lets the team back at base know what’s going on.

10. Last of all, have fun

As all the best football managers say, just go out there and enjoy yourselves. Trade shows can be a full on and exhausting few days, but they can also be a terrifically good time and the more relaxed you are, the better your sales pitch will be. Just remember you have to be up early and on top form each day. No-one wants to chat with a hungover exhibitor with the stench of last night's tequila on their breath...

About Aframe

Aframe's cloud video technology helps people connect and collaborate, making them more productive and improving execution in their video projects.

The ability to access high resolution rushes and production footage from anywhere in the world via a web browser enables companies to save time, money and focus on producing better video.

If you're going to be attending this year's NAB Show, why not drop by and say hi. We'll be in the Cloud Computing Pavillion in the North Hall (stand N-CP 13/14/15). See you there!

Keeping Your Content Safe – FACT!

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 17:36:00 -0000

Every time you go to the cinema you will see an advert before the film from the Federation Against Copyright Theft. Or more snappily, FACT.

These adverts warn you about being on the lookout for people trying to record the film from inside the cinema, and not buying pirated DVDs or illegally downloading or streaming films. With piracy costing the UK film industry £500M a year alone - and the UK economy £1.2bn - you can understand why.

The film and TV industries around the world employ some the hardest working and most passionate people around. Frequently going above and beyond the call of duty to get something made, and on lower salaries than they could get elsewhere, just for the sheer love of what they do.

So stealing what they have worked so hard to create is just plain wrong. Just to be clear though, there is much we as an industry can do to give consumers better access to programming they want, when they want it. But that's another blog post.

So, FACT do a great job on reminding us why we shouldn't pirate, and also at stopping those who do, including working with the police to make arrests.

What's probably less well known is what they do to promote the security of content before it ever hits our screens. During the process of creating a film or TV show, huge amounts of footage is created, with almost every second of it being vital to the vision of those who are making it. This team needs the time to work on it, and any director or producer will confirm that they hate anyone seeing their creation before they are happy with it. Equally importantly, millions of dollars are riding on the success of that vision, and the excitement that an audience has on seeing it for the first time.

So any leaks of the content during this process are a disaster for the team creating it, and the investors behind it, and that's before you get to the broadcasters or cinema chains who hope to make money from showing it.

A film or show go through a lot of different phases before they screen - production, editing, sound, grading, duplication, distribution and more. What FACT do is rigorously test the top suppliers in each part of the chain to check that they are completely focused on the security of the footage that passes through their doors.

The list is a short (deliberately so - as it's not easy to get on it) but an impressive one, and we're proud to say that Aframe has joined it.

So it's not just us you should listen to when we talk about how hard we work to keep your content safe. Words like 2048 bit encryption, private fibre networks and top tier datacentres may not mean much to you, but that great big FACT logo on our site should.

It's not just a pass once, keep it for ever kind of thing. We can be randomly audited - and at a bare minimum have to pass each and every year to keep our accreditation, so whether you become a customer now, or next year, you can be sure we're working as hard as we can to keep your content safe.

About Aframe

Aframe's cloud video technology helps people connect and collaborate, making them more productive and improving execution in their video projects.

The ability to access high resolution rushes and production footage from anywhere in the world via a web browser enables companies to save time, money and focus on producing better video.

Viva Las Vegas! 5 Things We’re Looking Forward to at NAB 2013

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 12:22:00 -0000

It’s busy times at the Aframe office as we’re in the middle of preparing to head off to Nevada. We’ll be making our second appearance at the NAB Show inside the enormous Las Vegas Convention Centre in April. Please join us!

For one week every year, the city that bills itself ‘The Entertainment Capital of the World’ plays host to the people behind the world’s most widely enjoyed form of entertainment, television, during the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Conference and Exhibition. As NAB says “No matter where you are in the Content Lifecycle – from creation to consumption – NAB Show is a must-attend event if you want to future-proof your career and your business.”

We first attended in 2012, soon after opening our Boston office, and had a really good, if exhausting, week. We saw a lot, met lots of people and gave dozens of demos of Aframe. Cloud computing was a really hot topic in the US and we had a lot of interest.

That’s still the case and the cloud is just becoming a bigger and bigger topic (see below). We’re hoping to have an even more successful show but, away from the Aframe booth in the Cloud Computing Pavilion up in the North Hall, there’s a lot of other really good stuff going on.

1) Trends and New Developments

The great thing about going to events like the NAB Show is the chance it gives us to see what’s going on in the industry and the new developments and trends. Much of the discussion this year will be around UHDTV and 4K’s continued expansion. While the end result is visually stunning, shifting that much data around is going to cause producers and broadcasters some serious headaches!

2) Cloud Computing Conference

We know the cloud isn’t just the future – it’s here now. At this year’s event there’s a 2 day conference dedicated to our favourite subject. The focus is on security and reliability for content distribution. Monday’s session "Content Delivery from the Cloud” looks like an interesting take on the TV Everywhere theme and features panellists from a range of key media outlets.

3) Meet the Editors

Aframe’s just released Edit Flow functionality supports export to the main NLEs. Apple aren’t exhibiting but we’ll be dropping in on Avid and Adobe who will both have a large presence at this year’s show to see what developments they have in the pipeline.

4) New Tech from Panasonic

Our partners Panasonic will be showcasing some new tech including cameras that use their AVC codecs for P2: AVC-LongG and AVC-Proxy. We formed our partnership with Panasonic ahead of last year’s NAB and the development of these cameras was specifically designed with platforms like Aframe in mind. As well as having an Aframe demo station within their gigantic Central Hall booth, we’ll also be on hand to talk about the integration and answer any questions.

5) Foot Long Margaritas

Well, it is Vegas after all!

If you’re at NAB, come and see us. We’ll be in the North Hall on booth N-CP13. Hope to see you there.

About Aframe

Aframe 2.0 Expands The Power of Cloud Video Production As a Smarter Option for Managing Media Assets

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 10:38:00 -0000

New Edit Flow™ Feature Moves Aframe-Generated Rough Edits, Compilations Directly into Avid, Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere; Save Costly Time in Edit Suites, Collaborate More Efficiently

LONDON and BOSTON, MA March 19, 2013 – Aframe today debuted major enhancements to its cloud video technology, Aframe 2.0, that provides a quicker way for video professionals to get content into editing. With productivity-enhancing capabilities including integration with Panasonic’s AVC codec, a newly designed user interface, and an API Library, the new version delivers capabilities of higher-end on premises media asset management solutions and a genuine competitive edge to its users.

Starting today, the new version of Aframe’s core platform includes Edit Flow™, a feature that allows users to export their metadata out of Aframe and directly into the three major NLE platforms – Avid Media Composer, Apple Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere. Edit Flow dramatically accelerates the early stages of productions and reduces total editing time. Edit Flow makes video production ever faster, easier and more flexible

With Edit Flow, Aframe users interact with the system as they have always done – uploading their raw video footage from wherever they are in the world onto Aframe’s private cloud, securely store it there, and share it with anyone, anywhere as they collaborate on TV, film, corporate video or advertising spots. But now, the timecode-specific metadata that Aframe users generate when commenting, logging, sub-clipping and collecting clips in Aframe can be transferred directly from the cloud into an NLE platform. Once there, the metadata relinks with the original media – retaining all user changes automatically.

Aframe’s Edit Flow was developed in part by Aframe software engineer Jeff Bedell, a technical Emmy award winner who as Avid Technology’s employee #2 wrote the initial code for the first Avid Media Composer.

“Edit Flow addresses a longstanding issue in the professional video workflow – the inefficiency in the early stages of productions when multiple team members organize rough-edit footage before the professional edit process starts - and further expand the time- and cost-saving advantages of Aframe’s secure cloud video production offering,” stated Aframe’s Jeff Bedell.

Significantly, with Edit Flow, multiple edits formats can all live together on Aframe, enabling genuine support for native camera rushes, high shoot ratios and multiple format projects. Aframe’s timecode extraction, metadata handling and export capabilities are features typically found in traditional on-premises media asset management solutions for many multiples the price.

“With Edit Flow, Aframe completes the postproduction collaborative circle, and becomes a great tool in enabling the direction of a story resulting in more streamlined and efficient productions,” said Michael Phillips, CTO of Cineworks Digital Studios, Inc. and co-inventor of the Avid Film Composer who beta tested the new Edit Flow features. “Now, when producers, directors and team members assemble rough cuts and comment about footage they compile in Aframe, their selects and remarks transfer directly to the editor in his or her NLE. It’s like the idea that many hands make light work. Aframe creates huge efficiencies during the creative editorial process by enabling entire teams of collaborators to simultaneously compile and comment on the collection of shots they want for the program, freeing the editor to focus on the magic of making the shots work together to tell the story rather than hunting for selects.”

Other Major Enhancements in Aframe 2.0:

- Capabilities for even faster mass downloads – an estimated 15X faster – saving time on the ingest when in the field or on location

- A greatly streamlined UI that lets users instantly see what they need and jump straight to work, with Aframe’s hallmark simplicity and social media-like look and feel.

- An API library that allows third-party solutions to connect more readily into the Aframe platform.

- Support for Panasonic’s AVC proxy workflow, allowing Panasonic users to streamline P2, AVCCAM and all file-based workflows for added efficiency and creative freedom. Users of Panasonic’s latest camera codec can transmit camera-generated proxies directly into Aframe, work on them, and relink with the full resolution media later in the edit suite

- As P2 expands to AVC-Ultra, specifically AVC LongG and AVC Proxy, Aframe also provides an ideal platform to utilize both full resolution and smaller file sizes.

Already many thousands of video professionals around the world rely on Aframe as a cloud-enabled asset management solution for production or as an adjunct to existing MAM solutions that expedites collaboration, review and approval and archive.

“Creativity is hard enough to achieve for clients and for far too long, video professionals have had to put up with all kinds of workarounds forced on them by technology,” said David Peto, CEO of Aframe. “By removing the storing, sharing and delivery frustrations of video production, Aframe 2.0 makes people more productive by solving the common video problems - from the first production meeting all the way through to the final edit. For companies serious about video, Aframe's cloud video technology powers people to deliver.”

Meet the Aframers – Steve Miu

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:49:00 -0000

At Aframe we’re proud of the ‘bench depth’ among our team, beyond our playful earlier InstaGrams. Please indulge us in crooning about the best of the best who work here.

Steve Miu is Aframe’s Senior Director of Product Operations based in Boston. Despite looking not a day over age 24, Steve has helped broadcast, media and entertainment businesses for over 20 years to better align their workflows and in doing so, eliminate both technological complexities and costs.

Some days he’s the support guy who answers a desperate call. On others he’s the sales engineer who helps customers work through some of the surprising “gotchas” that arise in the simplest projects.

But Steve is always our go-to guy for helping bust through the realities of today’s workflows so Aframe customers can work faster, easier and more cost effectively.

Agile, creative and systematic is how our customers describe Steve. Formally educated in electrical engineering, manufacturing, and marketing, he is a veteran of digital media companies and spent six years at Avid Technology in its high-growth phase. He’s well versed in networking technology, security, storage and how all kinds of broadcast equipment impacts file-based workflows. Clients say he can size up their internal environment and create a game plan for their most efficient and effective use of technology faster than anyone they know.

Title: Steve Miu, Senior Director of Product Operations
Favorite part of his work day: Helping customers reach that “a-ha” moment in terms of making the cloud work.
Likes most about Aframe: Technologically, Aframe sits at the crossroads of convergence in the Media industry – yet makes access and usability simple, seamless and elegant - MAM, networks, storage, metadata.
Surprising facts: English is his second language and Steve has black belts in Six Sigma and Kempo Karate.

Call Steve if you need help fighting to improve operations in your company!

We say Yahoo! to working from home.

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 18:47:00 -0000

The recent news from Yahoo about stopping employees working from home raises some interesting questions and dilemmas for companies and their managers.

Struggling in just about every market it operates in, you can see why new Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer, needed to quickly make some drastic changes. Her latest decree, that employees working remotely would now have to find their local Yahoo office and get used to the commute, has certainly rattled the cages of employees and commentators alike.

Back in October last year, she made the noble attempt to lead by example with a mere 2 weeks maternity leave. She even built a nursery next to her office (at her own expense) so that she could spend more time at work.

Having people sat in an office makes bosses feel better about what their employees are doing. They must be doing SOMETHING productive tapping away there. Right?

Maybe it makes you feel more responsive. After all, if you’ve got more agile decision making abilities then maybe the company can leap on market opportunities faster, if everyone is in the same office. You know that great idea you’ve just had? Having to dig out Larry’s mobile number, but then remembering Larry’s home has bad reception, so asking Human Resources for it, only for them to get all snooty because you shouldn’t be able to access his personal details… just doesn’t have the feeling of agility, does it?

But, in the case of Yahoo, there’s something a little jarring about both the message and the source of the message. Why would you, in the greatest age of flexible working (powered by technological conveniences like the cloud), expect people to be tied to an office? Commuting sucks, it’s expensive and takes hours of potentially productive time from your day. If you’re on public transport you can’t really work that effectively because, you know what? Your job is already online and reliant on an internet connection! That much won’t change, whether you’re working from the office or at home.

Being in the internet business ourselves, we’ve become absolutely reliant on our connection to the web. Email, calendars, project management, customer services, creating and accessing documents, CRM, financial software and social networking are all reliant on that internet connection being live and reliable. Even our office music comes through Spotify!

So, fair to say, if the Aframe office internet connection goes down (which is hardly ever, thankfully), we have to think for a minute about the work we did before this ‘always online’ way of working became the norm.

But anyway, back to the point: will having everyone in the office make the company more productive? Answer: I’m not sure.

Certainly for our customers, having the ability to employ someone based on their talent and not their geographic location, gives production companies, agencies and brands the opportunity to produce better video content. When you’re working in a multi-national organisation, across timezones, it’s just not practical or necessary to expect people to be in an office all of the time.

Maybe Marissa is cut from different cloth to me, but doesn’t this just boil down to a lack of trust? Whether someone works from home or the office, isn’t it a manager’s responsibility to ensure they get the most from their staff? Surely that’s the whole point of being a manager?

At Aframe, we like it when our staff are in the office; it creates a vibrant atmosphere and encourages dynamic discussions on random subjects (some of which may turn into great ideas). And yet, we understand that this isn’t always the best for our employees. When it becomes a requirement for them to work from home, we’d far rather they didn’t “work” from home and that they were actually able to continue like any other day in the office.

This ideology is at the core of Aframe and is one of the reasons our customers love using us. The ability to jump from one workspace to the next, taking everything with them as they do so, is what making great video is about. Without the stresses of life in the back of your mind, you can focus on doing what you do best; making great video.

About Aframe

Aframe Helps STV’s Iconic Game Show “Catchphrase” Expedite a Prime-Time Comeback

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 14:25:00 -0000

STV Saves a Full Week of Production Time, Plus Costs, Using Aframe’s Cloud Video Platform To Power Collaboration And Cloud Storage For Over 1,500 Graphic Sequences

LONDON and BOSTON, MA - February 26, 2012
Aframe announced that STV Productions is using Aframe’s cloud video production platform to expedite collaboration and lower production costs for “Catchphrase,” a remake of the classic game show airing this March on ITV. In a relaunch where snazzy graphics make all the difference, Aframe’s platform allowed STV’s production team to develop over 300 rich animation collections and store them securely in the cloud – then shave a full-week off of a demanding 7-week production cycle by cutting upload and download times as well as allowing anywhere, anytime review by a distributed team of animators and producers.

Co-produced by London-based teams for STV and its international production unit DRG, with a series creator based in the US, the new “Catchphrase” updates the format that aired for 16 years with juicer 3D graphics but retains popular elements such as a playful animated robot Mr. Chips who prompts contestants to “say what you see.” Contestants are presented with one of over 300 animations of phrases that are shown on a large screen and must be the first to correctly guess what each animation depicts. Over 1TB was needed to store and access animation graphics alone for the 9-episode package of shows – storage that would have wreaked havoc on the computing budget. The multiple iterations of these rich graphics also would have slowed collaboration, since team members would either need to drive a memory stick with a new iteration across town, overnight ship it, or send large files on the internal network where downloads would drag down network response times.

“Aframe saved us a ridiculous amount of time and enabled an immediate, almost live collaboration between producers in different offices that you could never get if we used a traditional on-premises computing network,” said Ed Egan, Executive Producer for Catchphrase. “We took one look at the size and volume of the animation sequences and knew they would cost us a fortune for the storage that we wouldn’t need once production ends. Aframe took what was a very time-consuming and cumbersome process of collaborating between offices across town and made it super easy.”

Using Aframe’s private cloud, each day’s animation content was uploaded once into Aframe, then sent as a link to authorized users, who could review an H264 proxy copy of the content, and comment from anywhere in the world, at any time they had a free moment – even from their mobile phone or tablet. Aframe users do not need to install special software or hardware, or enter cumbersome commands. Users simply log on to Aframe’s web-based platform and start working with video instantly. The immediacy of the collaboration shaved at least 5 hours of time off of each week’s work – at least an hour or two a day - allowing more time to be spent on creating juicier graphics and less on working out how to get the latest review copy.

“Security can be a concern with a cloud solution,” Executive Producer Ed Egan continued, “but with Aframe, only those we designate can review content – and no one can view our animations – even Aframe.”

“Production teams are no longer chained to an office – they’re global and on the move, and it’s high time technology worked the way production works,” said David Peto, CEO of Aframe. “We’re delighted to be a part of STV’s smashing relaunch of this much loved show.”

About Aframe

Aframe's cloud video technology helps people connect and collaborate, making them more productive and improving execution in their video projects.
Visit aframe.com to learn more.

Crispy Duck Productions Delivers Harper’s BAZAAR YouTube Series, “The Look” Using Aframe’s Cloud Video Technology

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 10:17:00 -0000

BOSTON, MA AND LONDON February 11, 2013
As Fashion Week continues in New York and ramps up in London, Aframe announced that its cloud video technology helped Crispy Duck Productions debut Season 2 of “The Look,” a weekly fashion celebrity interview program from Harper’s BAZAAR. Through the use of Aframe, the program achieves the lush production values that reinforce the magazine’s luxury positioning with speed and ease and at a budget not typically associated with cross-continent productions.

Filmed in full broadcast resolution, “The Look” airs Wednesdays on Hearst’s Hello Style channel, one of YouTube’s most popular fashion and beauty verticals. Crispy Duck Productions creates “The Look” to the same quality standards as broadcast TV, with none of the shortcuts often associated with web video. The first episode of the second season launched on February 6 with Tyra Banks. First season interviews included Michelle Dockery, Kim Kardashian – which drew more than 1m views – and Kiernan Shipka, of “Mad Men.”

Following each shoot, Crispy Duck’s team in New York uploads raw interview footage and stores it on Aframe’s private cloud network, allowing the London team to get to work immediately. Using Aframe avoids the delays and costs associated with overnight shipment of hard drives, and allows team members and clients to have anywhere, anytime access to the content. Aframe’s ultrafast delivery enables Laura Brown, executive editor of Harper’s BAZAAR and host of “The Look” to review raw footage with a simple click on a Web link to H264 proxy files. Aframe also provides features for real time commenting, creating simple assemblies and searching video that are helpful in expediting review and approval.

“Aframe allows us to efficiently manage the sorts of large-scale productions that have typically been beyond boutique production companies,” said Lindsay Lowe, Creative Director of Crispy Duck Productions, from their London HQ. “Crispy Duck is rapidly expanding and increasingly sought to deliver ever-larger productions at home and abroad. Aframe allows us to seamlessly capture and serve major clients from our US filming hubs in New York and LA, as easily – and economically - as if they were here with us in London.”

Operational in London since 2010, Aframe expanded its private cloud network to the US in 2012. Aframe’s highly secure, exceptionally fast cloud allows professional video creators to share, search and collaboratewithout on-site equipment or full-time staff – anywhere, anytime – requiring only an internet connection.

“Crispy Duck Productions proves that you can be forward-thinking as well as fashion forward, with the right technology solutions at your side,” said David Peto, CEO of Aframe.

About Aframe

Aframe's cloud video technology helps people connect and collaborate, making them more productive and improving execution in their video projects.
Visit aframe.com to learn more.

Aframe Helps Clean Cut Media Deliver on ATP World Tour Uncovered Video Production and Distribution

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 09:28:00 -0000

Faster delivery worldwide; Easier ingest of rushes, regardless of workflow; Easier, lower cost distribution via Aframe's private cloud video production platform

LONDON AND BOSTON, MA - January 29, 2013
As the 2013 ATP World Tour tennis season kicks off, Aframe announced that its cloud video production platform helped Clean Cut Media declare a victory over the time-intensive and costly process of sharing tennis footage globally.

Instead of delivering full broadcast resolution video footage using overnight shipment of tapes and hard drives, Clean Cut Media use Aframe to leverage cloud computing as a smarter way to produce and distribute a variety of tennis content. Working with production teams in Los Angeles and London, Clean Cut Media use Aframe’s private cloud network to:

Deliver “ATP World Tour Uncovered, presented by Rio”, the ATP’s 47 x weekly 26-minute magazine show as part of the distribution process to broadcasters in over 150 countries worldwide.
Ingest footage from ATP World Tour events in 61 tournaments in 31 countries on 6 continents, as well as from foreign producers and Clean Cut’s own film staff
Support remote access anywhere around the globe by ATP’s team or its local partners
Allow efficient versioning of content into multiple languages and country-specific packages, such as UK segments on Andy Murray
Sponsored content such as Player Profiles sponsored by FedEx and Moët & Chandon Champagne Moments
Accelerate review and approval of highlights and promo packages
Deal efficiently with each broadcaster’s unique workflow and broadcast standards and requirements, with always-accessible content stored securely in the cloud.

“We were looking for a time-efficient and cost-saving tapeless workflow. The great thing about Aframe is that it creates proxies from hi-res files for clients to view our work immediately before we send out the final version for broadcasters to download the full original format,” said January Lo, production manager at Clean Cut Media. “This secure private cloud network is a smarter way for us to upload large files and manage our online archive easily."

“In the hyper-competitive business of sports video, Aframe helped Clean Cut Media achieve the fast turnarounds that are paramount to ensuring broadcast content is kept fresh, and shows attract the audiences they seek,” said David Peto, CEO of Aframe.

About the ATP

The ATP is the governing body of the men's professional tennis circuits - the ATP World Tour, the ATP Challenger Tour and the ATP Champions Tour. With 61 tournaments in 31 countries, the ATP World Tour showcases the finest male athletes competing in the world’s most exciting venues. From Australia to Europe and the Americas to Asia, the stars of the 2013 ATP World Tour will battle for prestigious titles and Emirates ATP Rankings points at ATP World Tour Masters 1000, 500 and 250 events, as well as Grand Slams (non ATP events). At the end of the season only the world’s top 8 ranked singles players and doubles teams, based on their performance throughout the year, will qualify to compete for the last title of the season at the Barclays ATP World Tour Finals. Held at The O2 in London, the event will officially crown the 2013 ATP World Tour No.1 presented by Emirates.
For more information, please visit atpworldtour.com

About Clean Cut Media

Clean Cut Media are a production company creating high end programming for broadcast and corporate clients. They are highly skilled in delivering content on‐time without compromising quality, meeting and exceeding clients’ expectations.

Clean Cut Media produce the weekly lifestyle magazine show, ATP World Tour Uncovered Presented by Rio. The show provides fans with unrivalled behind-the-scenes access to the most exciting tennis players and tournaments on earth. Clean Cut Media produces 47 episodes each season and it is currently broadcast on Sky Sports in the UK and around the world in over 150 countries.

About Aframe

Aframe's cloud video technology helps people connect and collaborate, making them more productive and improving execution in their video projects.
Visit aframe.com to learn more.

Retaining Brand Control in a World of Online Video

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 16:54:00 -0000

With the increasing popularity of online corporate videos, it’s important that brands retain control and make the most of the invaluable benefits of video.

MARK OVERINGTON, PRESIDENT OF AFRAME, NORTH AMERICA

Mobile video traffic is set to double every year between 2011 and 2016. By this time, traffic generated by tablets alone will be nearly 2x more than total global mobile data was in 2011. What’s more, by 2016, nearly three-quarters (71%) of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video^[1]. Of course, this growth in demand for video isn’t exclusive to mobile, it’s everywhere.

The classic talking head video of the CEO has been replaced by more sophisticated production values and creativity in today’s corporate video. On the other hand, the informal ’whiteboard chalk talk video‘ for product training or updates have been massively successful and are very easy to create and deliver. If you’re still not sure where video fits in a corporate world, here are some increasingly popular examples, organized according to production costs and how complex they typically are to produce:

Product launches.
FAQs and support screen casts.
Testimonials from happy customers and employees.
Staff presentations.
Training and instructional films.
Video blogs and mobile videos.
User Generated Content campaigns.
Recruitment videos.
Internal communications.
HR policies.
Lectures and seminars.
Talk shows.
Crisis communication.
Knowledge bank & internal training.

Local businesses, international corporations, global enterprises, governments, charities; they’re all finally starting to exploit the power of online video to meet their daily communication needs.

Long gone are the days of running around looking for a conference room with a VCR to watch the latest marketing or training tape. Digital cameras and non-linear editing systems that are simple and easy to use have dramatically improved the ability for just about anyone to create a video and distribute it to the world via the Internet. The popularity of sites like YouTube and Vimeo has helped to make this process even easier and far cheaper.

Ironically, all this supposed freedom has actually resulted in marketing professionals becoming ‘boxed in’ by the limitations of corporate firewalls and a lack of buy-in by senior management who don’t see video as a realistic communications tool.

This new world of digital video communications is fast moving and that usually means it’s difficult to hold on to.

Brand management is one of the biggest challenges faced by any company in an open world like the Internet. Big brands require sophisticated and careful brand control and anti-dilution techniques; after all, a brand is nothing more than how your customers perceive you. And with video production being as cheap and easy as it is, it’s all too tempting for internal teams to bypass the corporate bureaucracy in favor of a fast turn around.

You can see the point though. It’s becoming an increasingly unsustainable in-house operation to govern. Stretched over several departments sometimes in different offices or even different countries, the process of creating video content is more than simply film, then deliver. Storage and backup, delivery requirements, working with third parties all have to be considered, even if they’re on the outer limits of what you might define as brand control. What’s more, any investment in on premise Media Asset Management (MAM) systems must be amortized and all assets must be monetized (if not for direct financial gains, they must demonstrate sufficient ROI).

Fortunately a transition is now underway and companies are starting to ‘think smart’ about how they produce video efficiently and successfully, whilst still retaining full control of the creative and the process. If you haven’t already, it’s time to move to the cloud.

The benefits of global collaboration, centralized access-anywhere storage and operational, rather than capital, outlay are no longer constrained by the requirement for an exhaustive IT department with an equally exhausting budget. B2B tools such as those from Google, Dropbox, Salesforce and others have become established online platforms for almost every Fortune 500 company. And whilst YouTube and Vimeo have created a brilliant network to distribute finished content to a public audience, using these for production is simply unrealistic.

Progress had been made in opening up the professional video production process by using tools designed primarily for other uses and yet none offered a solution for businesses and corporations to stay in control, no matter who you were in the company (why should you only be able to view footage from your video shoot if you’re a pro editor?).

Excusing the shameless plug, companies such as Aframe are now providing feasible solutions, capable of handling all of the demands required by global enterprises. This sort of ‘camera-to-broadcast’ solution allows complete control over the entire organization’s media assets from the initial filming, through production and on to distribution and storage.

As the uptake of video destined for online distribution continues to increase, it will be the responsibility of senior decision makers to take responsibility of the entire production, whether outsourced or completed internally, to ensure the key message is effectively communicated.

[1] Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2011–2016

About Aframe

Aframe's cloud video technology helps people connect and collaborate, making them more productive and improving execution in their video projects.
Visit aframe.com to learn more.

Expanding the video cloud: Aframe joins forces with Panasonic to expand production solutions for video

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 11:32:00 -0000

David Peto, Aframe CEO announces Panasonic partnership
at NAB 2012

We’ve been working hard over the last few months to develop our relationship with Panasonic and today we’re finally able to announce our official partnership.

If you were at NAB or IBC in 2012, you may have seen us exhibiting on the Panasonic stand to demonstrate our unique cloud based, tapeless workflow. Hopefully that was a clue that we‘d be working even more closely with Panasonic and now that we’re able to talk more openly about the partnership, here are a few more details.

(click here to read the official release)

Panasonic Reseller Network

From the end of January 2013, Panasonic will start to sell Aframe licenses through its extensive authorized video reseller network. Existing and new customers of Panasonic now have the chance to not only purchase some of the leading professional video cameras on the market, but also enter into an entirely new way of producing video, with Aframe’s cloud based video production platform.

Through the network, clients can purchase annual accounts for 2 or more users and can add blocks of 4 users to support 3 month projects.

Visit www.panasonic.com/broadcast for more info.

Codec Complement

Aframe’s technology partnership with Panasonic enables users to take advantage of an entirely new workflow that can work with the latest Panasonic AVC codecs for P2: AVC-LongG and AVC-Proxy. The development of these cameras was specifically designed with platforms like Aframe in mind.

Upload Partners

As well as opening the doors to a much wider network of resellers, the Panasonic partnership also sees the development of a unique workflow designed to accelerate the upload/ingest part of your production.

Take your uncompressed, raw footage into one of our Upload Partners and they’ll handle the entire upload for you. Leaving you to focus on the thousand-and-one other things you need to work on.

Our Upload Partners have dedicated high-speed fiber lines with a minimum 100MBs connection, meaning you won’t be left waiting for long. If you’ve only got a small amount of footage, they can upload while you wait, or you can drop a drive off and have them return it to you once it’s available online.

All of the files will retain their existing folder structure and enable you to access your footage from anywhere in the world where you have an Internet connection. Once in Aframe, you and your team are able to collaborate on the entire production, commenting directly onto your footage and organising your media ready for the edit.

A Workflow for Any Production

Depending on your specific production demands (time, cost, global scale etc), you might prefer a high or low-resolution workflow to make your production easier:

High-resolution (Original raw, uncompressed footage)

If you’ve got high bandwidth and fast data rates, utilize our accelerated uploader to handle all your media yourself.
If your Internet connection isn’t quite up to scratch, you can ‘outsource’ your ingest to one of our Upload Partners and they’ll handle everything for you.

Low-resolution Proxies

Use your own Internet and even mobile data connections to obtain the fastest means of getting content into Aframe.
Use an Upload Partner to ingest your full resolution footage at a later date.
Use Aframe Edit Flow^TM to merge all of the metadata generated in Aframe once you’re ready for the edit.
Take your low-resolution proxy and distribute it for on air delivery and consumption as soon as it's available for late breaking news, etc.

About Aframe

Aframe's cloud video technology helps people connect and collaborate, making them more productive and improving execution in their video projects.
Visit aframe.com to learn more.

Panasonic Partners with Aframe to Sell Cloud Video Production Solutions to Content Creators

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 11:10:00 -0000

Panasonic U.S. to Sell Aframe Solutions to Video Professionals: Bringing Greater Speed, Security, Efficiency to Global-Scale Productions

SECAUCUS, NJ - January 22, 2013
Panasonic and Aframe today announced a partnership whereby Panasonic will sell Aframe licenses in the United States through its network of Panasonic pro video resellers. Furthering a relationship established last year, this partnership makes it easier for video professionals to harness Aframe’s acclaimed cloud video production platform to streamline P2, AVCCAM and all file-based workflows for added efficiency and creative freedom. Aframe also provides an ideal platform to utilize smaller file sizes available as P2 expands to AVC-Ultra, specifically AVC LongG and AVC Proxy.

Effective January 28, Panasonic will be selling Aframe through its authorized professional video resellers. Annual accounts start at $1200 (suggested list price) for the first two seat licenses. Additional seats can be added two at a time for the full year, or in blocks of four to support three-month projects. Qualified customers should contact their authorized Panasonic pro video reseller or sales representative to discuss how best to support their organizational workflow and configure a trial account to start utilizing Aframe software.
More information is available at www.panasonic.com/broadcast.

Based in London with U.S. headquarters in Boston, Aframe’s cloud video production solutions have been providing services to the BBC, MTV, film and TV production firms, corporate video departments and ad agencies in Europe and the U.S. since 2009.

A cloud video production platform, Aframe saves professionals time, stress and money all the way through a production workflow. Users can share, search and collaborate without on-site equipment or full-time staff, and only require an internet connection. Aframe expedites media movement, allows more accessibility from today’s devices for improved productivity and one-stop collaboration. It allows for any original, large broadcast-quality video format in any length to be uploaded, including uncompressed raw footage. The highly secure private cloud-based platform eliminates many of the issues associated with global video production, and its user interface makes it as easy to use as Facebook.

“Our partnership with Aframe delivers a further improvement to Panasonic’s well-established, popular file-based workflows, and provides our customers with an attractive value proposition: a complete P2 workflow solution without requiring IT hardware,” said Michael Bergeron, Senior Business Development Manager, Panasonic System Communications Company of North America (PSCNA). “Moreover, our technology partnership enables an evolving and improving workflow that is particularly conducive to Panasonic’s latest AVC codecs for P2: AVC-LongG and AVC-Proxy were imagined with platforms like Aframe in mind.”

“Video professionals want to get content out of their cameras and media asset management systems and into the cloud where they can back it up, share it with team members around the world and organize it into breakthrough creative even faster,” said Mark Overington, president of Aframe North America “We’re honored to partner with Panasonic in helping video producers to streamline their entire production workflow by making smart use of cloud computing.”

Since launching North American operations, Aframe has established a network of over a dozen Aframe Upload Center Partners in the U.S. with high-speed ingest onto the company’s private cloud video production network. Locations include New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta, Miami, Boston and Dallas.

About Panasonic Solutions for Business

Built on a celebrated engineering foundation, Panasonic architects business technology solutions that help build a better world. Customers in government, healthcare, production, education and a wide variety of commercial enterprises, large and small, depend on integrated solutions from Panasonic to help them acquire, manage and interpret the information that drives innovation. The complete suite of Panasonic solutions addresses unified business communications, mobile computing, security and surveillance systems, retail information systems, office productivity solutions, high definition visual conferencing, projectors, professional displays and HD video production. As a result of its commitment to R&D, manufacturing and quality control, Panasonic engineers reliable and long-lasting solutions as a partner for continuous improvement. Panasonic solutions for business are delivered by Panasonic System Communications Company of North America, which is a division of Panasonic Corporation of North America, the principal North American subsidiary of Panasonic Corporation (NYSE: PC).

All brand and company/product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of the respective companies. All specifications are subject to change without notice. Information on Panasonic solutions for business can be obtained by calling 877-803-8492 or at www.panasonic.com.

About Aframe

Aframe's cloud video technology helps people connect and collaborate, making them more productive and improving execution in their video projects.
Visit aframe.com to learn more.

Alternative Asset Management: the Bank Counting on Video

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 16:31:00 -0000

You wouldn't expect the Financial Times to be the place you discover people who are using video in new ways. Whilst trying to read my copy of the FT in the one square inch of space you get on a normal London commuter train, I came across a really brilliant piece on a Bank that has set up a TV Channel.

Now I know what you're thinking at this moment - hold on - I've been subjected to the Banks’ "TV" channels for years whilst stuck in the 20 minute queue to speak to someone. Nothing more than canned adverts for the bank’s products on a rolling reel of death, they only just beat the horror of being sat in the doctor’s surgery faced with the same thing but running pieces on how you are overweight, stressed or at risk of cancer.

This TV channel is different - it's a genuine news channel that has become the one of the most watched, in the entire country.

The country is Sweden and the bank in question is Handelsbanken, a rapidly expanding organisation with branches across Europe. Launching a news channel is something that you might associate with a trendy investment bank or one of the high street giants, not a relative unknown.

Renowned for its deliberate policy of devolving decision making to a local branch to provide a more personalised service, Handelsbanken is a genuine believer in relationship banking and knowing their customers. It only lends money only to people who can actually pay it back, as an example.

Their approach is clearly working. Not only was it the only bank in Sweden not to take a government bailout (much to the annoyance of its competitors apparently), it's growing like crazy here in the UK, opening branches at the rate of two a week.

The FT article "Sweden's Back to the Future Banker" sums them up well. They launched their TV channel not because a strategic consultant told them so, but because when they asked their customers how they liked to get information, they said "video clips".

Rather than just put up some clips on what products they provide and some fluff marketing speech from the CEO, they decided to go all out and make a full news channel. The result is this (Swedish language only): http://tv.handelsbanken.se.

The channel now has over 100,000 viewers in Sweden and is the country's leading online news service.

They realised that as a corporation - be that a bank, mobile phone network, car manufacturer or coffee shop, one of the things that sets you apart from your competition is what value you can give to your customer. The TV channel from Handelsbanken gives people something they value - up to date financial news in short digestible clips that they can watch anywhere. In return the bank keeps its customers happy and reinforces its brand with those who aren't yet clients.

I'm amongst the many people here in the UK who isn’t exactly jumping for joy when it comes to the service from their bank. The way Handelsbanken operates has certainly caught my eye - I'd never heard of them before reading this article. Whether they'd want my overdraft is another matter, but I'd be interested in becoming a customer!

If as a corporation you read this and take one thing away - it's that Handelsbanken's customers told them they wanted video. The challenge is to give them they want in return - high quality, informative video that's regularly produced, with all the challenges that entails. In true Handelsbanken fashion - we'd be happy to help.

About Aframe

Aframe's cloud video technology helps people connect and collaborate, making them more productive and improving execution in their video projects.
Visit aframe.com to learn more.

Aframe Helps Indie Filmmakers at Laboratory Deliver Same-Day Dailies Worldwide Using Cloud Computing

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 12:00:00 -0000

A Breakthrough For Film and TV Production, Aframe’s Cloud Video Platform Helped Producers Stay Focused On their Creative – Finally Making Dailies True to their Name, Saving Time and Costs

LONDON and BOSTON, MA - December 11, 2012

Aframe, the cloud video production platform company, announced that Laboratory in New York used Aframe 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.”

Thousands of TV and film producers, corporate video department members, advertising agency members and post-production teams rely on Aframe’s private cloud network to the US and UK including the BBC, MTV, Blink Films, Discovery Channel, Veria Living and more. Aframe’s highly secure, exceptionally fast cloud allows professional video creators to share, search and collaboratewithout on-site equipment or full-time staff – anywhere, anytime – requiring only an internet connection.

“We applaud Laboratory and the “Birder’s Guide team for proving you don’t need a big budget or a big staff to make a bold move into the future and achieve the hyper-efficiency that comes from working smarter,” said David Peto, CEO and co-founder of Aframe.

About Aframe

Aframe's cloud video technology helps people connect and collaborate, making them more productive and improving execution in their video projects.
Visit aframe.com to learn more.

MTV Gives Aframe an Encore to Distribute Awards Footage via the Cloud

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 12:32:00 -0000

Aframe’s Cloud Video Platform Provides Secure, Instant, Easy Downloads of Annual Music Awards Content for 500 Global Media Contacts, Without The Need for Software or Hardware

LONDON and BOSTON, MA - December 6, 2012
Aframe announced that for the second year in a row, Viacom International Media Networks used Aframe’s cloud video production platform to distribute highlights and clips of its 2012 MTV EMA show via the Internet – superfast and yet securely – rather than costly or cumbersome alternatives. Backed by Aframe’s private cloud network, MTV’s PR teams helped maximize impact of this must-see event in broadcast reports, online and on mobile devices.

The hottest international awards show with a star-studded roster including Taylor Swift, Alicia Keys and The Killers, the 2012 MTV EMAs had the instant appeal that demands both widespread media access to footage to support broadcast and online coverage, and security. After a successful use of Aframe at the 2011 MTV EMAs, MTV expanded its Aframe use to allow up to 200 journalists on Aframe’s secure platform.

With Aframe, MTV’s PR teams could distribute content as widely as it desired by simply granting access as needed to media contacts as needed, anywhere and on the fly – without requiring media to install special software or hardware, or enter cumbersome commands. Users simply log on to Aframe’s web-based platform and start working with video instantly.

Once in Aframe, journalists and bloggers could view and select precise clips they needed, instead of downloading an entire package, and then choose a clip afterwards. MTV could also use Aframe to add metatags to the footage, to make video searchable by comments, file names, collections and summaries - making it easy to find just the right clip in seconds. Such speed and easy access further facilitated the media’s creation of MTV EMA show reports for use on TV, online and on mobile devices.

"Killer acts deserve killer treatment, and Aframe made it fast and easy for media anywhere to access MTV EMA footage and create packages to keep the buzz going about the show for days,” said David Peto, CEO of Aframe. “Aframe also saved time, hassle and bandwidth costs for MTV’s PR teams and for the journalists they work with. Now that’s a real winner!”

About Aframe

Aframe's cloud video technology helps people connect and collaborate, making them more productive and improving execution in their video projects.
Visit aframe.com to learn more.

10 Tips For Producing Your First Corporate Video (Whilst Ensuring it’s Not Your Last)

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 14:59:00 -0000

You’ve been asked to produce a corporate video, and it’s your first time. That panicked feeling is perfectly normal. Here are some tips to make sure your first production is a smash…

...and not a car-crash…

1. Make a plan

Deciding on a budget and creating a timeline isn’t sexy work, but it’s absolutely essential for a smooth production. Set dates for important milestones like picking a team, completing the script, shooting footage and finishing the edit. Be realistic, and stick to the plan.

2. Know your audience

A training video viewed by employees should look and feel very different to a video destined to be viewed and shared on social media. Be clear about who you’re trying to reach, right from the beginning.

3. Hone your message

Can you summarize the message of your video in a couple of sentences? If not, you may be trying to say too much. Sharpen that message to a point so fine you can cut your nails with it. In general, the simpler the message, the more effective it will be.

4. Choose your team

Don’t be afraid to call in professionals when it makes sense. Be ruthlessly honest about the areas in which you will need the most help, whether that means the writing, shooting, editing or all of the above. This may be your first rodeo, but that doesn’t mean you should work with an inexperienced crew.

5. Get creative

With your audience and message in mind, it’s time to flex some creative muscle. You must decide how you are going to communicate your message. This is where the ordinary can become extraordinary, so reach for the skies, but be original! A good team (see point 4) is invaluable here.

6. Participate

Make contributions to the script and try and be on set during principle photography. If you are too hands off, you may get a nasty surprise later on in the process.

7. Pay attention to detail

No matter how many people are on your team, ultimately you must be the one that notices the little things. Take ownership of this early in the production. A missed scene or a typo can bring the general level of quality down, so be sure that you are the one to notice these things.

8. Be cool

Shoots will be delayed by weather. Equipment will break down. Try to keep some perspective and roll with the changes. You’ll avoid a nervous breakdown, and everyone around you will appreciate it.

9. Be confident

Every painter has to walk away from the canvas eventually. Tweaking colors and obsessing over the edit can—and sometimes does—go on forever. Don’t be that client. Have confidence in your choices and don’t second guess yourself.

10. Have fun

Make sure you take time to appreciate the process along the way. You will get to work with creative professionals and create something unique.

Hopefully these tips will help you create a successful video. Now it’s your turn. If you have any tips for ensuring a smooth production, or even your own corporate videos, add them in the comments below.

About Aframe

Aframe's cloud video technology helps people connect and collaborate, making them more productive and improving execution in their video projects.
Visit aframe.com to learn more.

Aframe: What's in the name?

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 14:26:00 -0000

Our customers sometimes ask us why we’re called Aframe, some simply spell it wrong. So here's why we're called "Aframe".

Choosing the name of your company, product or brand is an extremely tricky business. Much harder than naming your children, in my opinion. Your child’s name doesn’t have to be unique, it doesn’t need to have a suitable web address and its very own Twitter handle (though some tech savvy parents disagree). It doesn’t need to convey some meaning to potential ‘friends’ and you don’t have to think how it might translate into different languages.

In engineering terms, an A-frame is a simple structure with a light and efficient design, able to bear loads in a stable, economic manner. The simplest form of an A-frame structure is two similarly sized beams, arranged at a 45-degree angle, attached at the top. Common uses for the A-frame structure are ladders, houses, tents and even the support for the London Eye. We made Aframe to be similarly efficient and robust.

In film terms, a ‘frame’ describes the still images that make up the complete moving picture. In ye olde world of film, single images were recorded on a strip of photographic film that looked like a framed picture when viewed individually. When the moving picture is displayed, each frame is flashed on a screen for a short time before being replaced by the next. The eye blends the frames together, producing the illusion of a moving image. The rate at which these frames are displayed per second is a common unit of measurement, called frame rate, with 25 fps being the most common standard in use.

So that’s Aframe. Capital A, lower case f and definitely no hyphen, thank you very much.

Not that we’re picky or anything…

About Aframe

Aframe's cloud video technology helps people connect and collaborate, making them more productive and improving execution in their video projects.
Visit aframe.com to learn more.

Demand Service With Your Software!

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 13:03:00 -0000

One of our customers recently sent a note of thanks that raised a really interesting point about making new technology work in business. He was complimenting us on the service he received whilst using Aframe for the first time (sorry, this isn’t supposed to be so self congratulatory) and articulated a point few technology providers seem to consider when they roll out their ‘killer apps’.

JD Freedman, a Massachusetts based freelance producer, has mountains of experience in the video industry, covering just about every role at some point whilst working with the likes of broadcast giants Disney, Comedy Central and HBO, as well as big brands like United Airlines, Smirnoff and Swatch.

JD had just attended a presentation of Aframe at DigiNovations, one of our upload partners and thought the system might be useful one day, though no immediate project sprang to mind.

The next day he received a flurry of emails from a client in Italy who faced an impending edit deadline, urgently requesting footage of an interview he’d recently filmed with Noam Chomsky at MIT. After unsuccessfully trying to send the files with Dropbox because the files were too large, JD remembered Aframe from the demo the previous day and decided to give us a go.

Now how many times have you used a piece of new technology, a web service or an app on your phone and thought ‘this thing doesn’t work, I’m going to ditch it’? How better might the technology have been if you had someone on the phone, offering some useful and well-timed assistance?

JD eloquently agreed: "Man what service! The constantly evolving technology we deal with is amazing, but it's service-minded people like the guys at Aframe that really make it work. They went above and beyond and stopped everything they were doing to make my situation their priority. They have turned me into an Aframe evangelist!"

If there’s a moral to this tale, it’s this: next time you’re signing up for a ‘killer app’, just make sure there’s some service behind all the glitz and glamour of that shiny new software, otherwise it’s just style without substance.

About Aframe

Aframe's cloud video technology helps people connect and collaborate, making them more productive and improving execution in their video projects.
Visit aframe.com to learn more.

Using Cloud for Disaster Recovery

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 15:08:00 -0000

The devastation Hurricane Sandy reaped on the US East Coast last week had far reaching implications for the people and the businesses in her path. The businesses that call Manhattan, Atlantic City or New Jersey home may thank the cloud that helps them continue trading in the days and possibly weeks it takes the region to recover.

For many people around the world, relying on cloud services is a natural part of their normal working day. For a cloud company like Aframe you’d probably expect us to ‘eat our own dog food’ (and we do), but more and more ‘traditional’ businesses are turning to the cloud, and not only in disaster recovery mode.

Faced with a similar situation to Sandy, most organisations are sufficiently ‘tooled up’ with cloud services to keep their businesses online by asking staff to work from home. So in the event that their office is under 12 feet of water, or the power is down, the cloud helps the wheels of commerce keep on turning. Our reliance on cloud services for email, client databases and data storage means we can continue operating at practically full capacity from home or temporary office.

So what happens to the areas of your business not in the cloud? If you are making TV, films, ads or video content of any kind professionally,what plans have you made to not only provide back up for your precious content, but also to ensure the team has access to it so you don’t miss your deadline? You might not even be in the vicinity of Hurricane Sandy (or any another natural disaster), but your on-premise data could be and could go down without sufficient redundancy or back up plans in place.

So even if you’re miles away from the eye of the storm, sadly your nightmare could be just beginning.

If you’re sat with colleagues from IT at your Christmas party, ask them about their plans for data accessibility and safety in the event of a disaster. Failing that, ask them to look into the reliability you can expect when signing up for your next cloud service.

Aframe Up for an Award!

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 11:12:00 -0000

Aframe have been shortlisted for the Startups Awards 2012 in the Angel or VC-backed Business of the Year category, to be announced in December.

Duncan Bannatyne, of Dragons’ Den fame, will lead the judging panel alongside a number of other highly successful entrepreneurs and business experts including James Hurley, enterprise editor for the Daily Telegraph and Kevin Byrne, managing director of checkatrade.com.

Wish us luck!

Aframe Names Two New US Aframe Upload Center Partners, Adrenaline Films and Midtown Video

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 11:02:00 -0000

Partners Offer High-Speed Ingest Onto Aframe’s Private Cloud Network; Further Expands Aframe’s US Presence So Professionals Can Save Time, Stress, Hassles in Video Production Workflow

BOSTON, MA - October 23, 2012
Aframe, the cloud video production platform designed to liberate the professional video production process, today named two more Aframe Upload Partners Adrenaline Films of Orlando and Midtown Video of Miami – to further expand its private cloud network in the US.

Aframe Upload Partners give video professionals a fast and easy way to upload large amounts of video footage as a first step toward using Aframe’s production workflow in the cloud. Clients now can visit Midtown Video or Adrenline Films and upload their dailies and corporate footage directly onto Aframe's secure servers using each facility’s high-speed data lines. Aframe Upload Partners ensure fast and reliable uploads, and saving client time for more important production tasks. Aframe then transcodes the uploaded media into H264 web viewing proxies, and offers a wide complement of other collaboration and distribution services that each Upload Partner provides alongside their existing roster of offerings in post production.

With a network of over a dozen Aframe Upload Partners and counting, Aframe is making it easier than ever for professional to harness the power of cloud computing to save time and money in the professional content creation workflow.

“We welcome Adrenaline Films and Midtown Video and to our growing lineup of Aframe Upload Partners in the US,” said Mark Overington, President of Aframe North America. “Together we can reinvent the production workflow so that creatives can be creative, and the process is easier, faster and more efficient.”

Each new Aframe Upload Center Partner will hold an open house next to showcase the ways that Aframe can transform the professional video workflow. Open houses will take place at Adrenaline Films on Tuesday October 30 from 5-7 pm ET, and at Midtown Video on Thursday November 1 from 1-3 pm ET.

About Adrenaline Films

Adrenaline Films is a full service video production company whose production services are crafted to powerfully deliver your information and generate results. Based out of Orlando, Florida, Adrenaline Films offers expertise throughout the world in a wide range of areas from production crews and equipment packages to independent film and programming. Adrenaline's mission is to provide you with a production team you can rely on to supply exceptional value, innovative ideas, and comprehensive media production services.
For more information visit adrenalinefilms.com.

About Midtown Video

Midtown Video leads the industry in broadcast and professional video and multimedia equipment sales, rental and systems design and integration. Providing you with the highest quality equipment and technical support is our main mission. We get the job done with excellent sales people and support staff offering workable solutions to your production and post requirements.
For more visit midtownvideo.com

About Aframe

Aframe's cloud video technology helps people connect and collaborate, making them more productive and improving execution in their video projects.
Visit aframe.com to learn more.

The Facts about Factual Programming and the Cloud

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 16:05:00 -0000

If you're a frequent visitor to Aframe.com you've probably noted a trend. Factual programming leaders are embracing cloud computing, they love Aframe, and they are often ahead of their scripted series peers in moving to new production paradigms that streamline the workflow and save time and money.

This week's Blink Films début on Discovery World (Canada) shows why.

Reality TV series, documentaries, awards shows and factual formats have an insanely high shoot to air ratio. Whereas an indie film maker might shoot 50 hours of footage and call it a wrap, factual producers are usually well into the hundreds of hours per episode. With "The Manor Reborn" from BBC Factual, the teams needed to sift through 600 hours of footage for just one 90-minute episode! With Dragonfly's "World's Toughest Trucker" aired on Channel 5, the series involved 4,000 hours of footage, shot on a variety of camera formats. It required multiple format transcodes and access to full resolution files as well as proxies.

Factual content also increasingly involves cross-continent production teams, which is another hurdle. When rushes take three days to arrive via overnight shipments to each of 20 collaborators' doors, because customs clearances add to the delays, there's nothing "rushed" about them.

For "Classic Car Rescue", which débuted this week, Blink Films and its post house ClearCut Pictures were creating a Canadian version of a UK series, with staff on either side of the pond in Toronto and London. The team had to sift through many hundreds of hours of footage, upload it searingly fast, keep it locked down and secure, in support of the usual accelerated production schedule.

Aframe truly came to the rescue. "Before Aframe we were transferring TBs of data on hard-disk, via courier, across the Atlantic," said Ben King, designer, format editor and post workflow consultant for the project. "This meant a huge cost and often a considerable delay for the recipients. Now, with Aframe's unlimited file sizes and native media storage, we could easily upload the new footage as soon as it was brought back from the shoot, and share it to remote locations around the globe in a fraction of the time it would normally take," Ben said.

Blink collaborators in Toronto, the client Discovery World (Canada) in Toronto, the post house Clear Cut Pictures in London, and Blink team members in London and everywhere could later access rushes instantly, and securely thanks to Aframe's multi-layered security approach. Collaborators could even comment directly on an edit stream from their iPhones as well as their Macs or PCs – a real plus given producers' busy schedules. The team also used other Aframe workflow and collaboration facilities to streamline the workflow.

"I doubt we could have completed this show on time and on budget by working the traditional way" said Ben.

Check out the press release , and see why the BBC, Dragonfly, and other factual producers are putting Aframe to the rescue.

Streamlining the Post Production Workflow for Blink Films & Clear Cut Pictures

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 16:07:00 -0000

We've been working recently with Blink Films, and Clear Cut Pictures (also one of Aframe's Upload Partners), to dramatically streamline their post production workflow for the new TV show 'Classic Car Rescue' (debuting tonight, Oct 16, at 8pm ET/10pm PT on Discovery World); using Aframe’s cloud video production platform to expedite a cross-Atlantic production.

The show’s hosts scour the United Kingdom, Canada and US for rust buckets that they restore to their former glory. In order to meet the air date, the UK line manager needed a way to enable trans-Atlantic editing for a Canadian coproduction where footage could be accessed simultaneously in London and Toronto. The solution also needed to be user friendly, and feasible for use by the London-based post house Clear Cut Pictures and for the internal editing team. With many hundreds of hours of raw footage shot for the series, a traditional on-premises media asset management solution simply wouldn’t do.

“Aframe made our exceptionally challenging trans-Atlantic workflows faster, safer and easier," said Ben King, designer, format editor and post workflow consultant for 'Classic Car Rescue.' “Before Aframe we were transferring TBs of data on hard-disk, via courier, across the Atlantic. This meant a huge cost and often a considerable delay for the recipients. Now, with Aframe’s unlimited file sizes and native media storage, we could easily upload the new footage as soon as it was brought back from the shoot, and share it to remote locations around the globe in a fraction of the time it would normally take,” Ben said.

“I doubt we could have completed this show on time and on budget by working the traditional way.”

Many hundreds of hours of 'Classic Car Rescue' series footage and files were backed-up securely off-site in multiple locations, where they could be retrieved whenever needed – without the threat of loss or corruption. When it came to viewing, Ben and the team could send out a link to edit or clips of footage that opened on Mac, PC or mobile device - without having to worry if the producers and commissioner had the correct software to see it.

"When a commissioner is trying to view an edit on their iPhone after hours or on holiday - you definitely do not want to mess up delivery!" Ben said.

Both Blink’s teams in Toronto and London, as well as its post house Clear Cut Pictures in London, also made heavy use of Aframe’s collaboration features to comment directly on the video stream - giving Ben a set of edit notes from which to work more efficiently.

“More and more customers are getting tuned in to the ways the cloud can transform their video production process,” said Horacio Queiro, CEO of Clear Cut Pictures. “We streamline the entire process and make everyone’s lives easier with Aframe on board.”

“Cross continent production is becoming more the norm than the exception, but on-premises video collaboration technology just can’t keep pace,” said David Peto, CEO of Aframe. “Aframe is tailor-made for expediting video production by freeing creative to focus on their art, and centralizing their footage cloud- along with all the workflow features they need to shape an amazing final production.”

Loft London added to Aframe's growing roster of Upload Partners

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 16:13:00 -0000

Loft London, a leading independent digital media facility in West London has become the latest centre to partner with Aframe, aimed at assisting our clients with uploading high resolution media into their Aframe accounts.

Aframe Upload Partners offer production companies a convenient and simple method of transferring video content to Aframe’s cloud platform. Amongst many services Loft London offer, they are the first of our partners to specialise in mass digitisation of media to help producers evolve from tape based servicing to digital distribution.

Aframe clients can now take their pre or post produced content on any format to Loft London’s facilities in Chiswick and have them converted and ingested to Aframe's secure data centres, ensuring fast and reliable upload, and saving client time for more important production tasks. Footage is then transcoded into H264 web viewing proxies for simple and convenient online collaboration, whilst storing the high-res original for later retrieval.

“Offering Aframe is a natural evolutionary step for Loft London. We already specialize in helping clients with all aspects of the content lifecycle, so we were very happy to add Aframe’s cloud services to our portfolio," said Davide Maglio, Director and Partner of Loft London. "We believe that by partnering with Aframe, Loft London offers practical solutions to the past, present and future of video production.”

About Loft London

Loft London is a dedicated media facility servicing clients across the broadcast media industry. Its clients include both international broadcasters and smaller content owners, including BBC World Service, ESPN, Red Bull, On Demand Group, BSkyB, Central Partnerships (Russia), Orbit Showtime Network (UAE) and Mauris Film (Russia).

Founded in 2007, Loft London has built a reputation for technical expertise, exceptional customer service and flexible pricing models. Loft London’s focus is to work with content owners, content creators and distributors through all stages of the content lifecycle and the evolution from tape based servicing to digital distribution.

Loft London offers a total video servicing package, encompassing ageing formats and libraries through to current HD and 3D standards, with the ability to deliver to any Digital Asset Management Service platform.

Loft London's high end encode, ingest, transcode, storage and digital distribution facility together with its experienced and accessible team, positions Loft London as a fast growing, global media hub.

North West Post House VTR North Unveiled as Aframe's Latest Upload Partner

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 09:42:00 -0000

We're thrilled to announce the latest partner to the Aframe Upload Centre network, VTR North. Based in Manchester and Leeds, this partnership further widens our reach in providing an upload solution to handle original, high resolution video files/rushes in almost any file format and of unlimited file sizes.

With a network of Upload Partners already established across the US, we are building on the growth of the Manchester video production scene by selecting the post production house to assist production companies and broadcasters in transferring their video production operations to Aframe's private cloud storage and collaboration network.

VTR, best known for their work in commercials, opened a Manchester office in May to capitalise on the wave of production work coming to the region. They have already been used on several BBC productions, including a half hour special of ‘Show Me Show Me’ for CBeebies. They see the booming TV business and Aframe's expansion plans as perfect timing for the area.

“When Aframe approached us we knew that producers coming to the area would need services that would help them collaborate with colleagues located in the area and around the country, so this partnership couldn’t have come at a better time” said VTR MD Carl Walters.

About VTR North

Established in 2005, VTR North delivers creative post production and visual effects in Leeds and Manchester. Their award winning team and state of the art suites provide a relaxed and enjoyable environment to produce outstanding work.

To ingest your video footage / rushes into your Aframe account via VTR North's upload service, email info@vtrnorth.co.uk or call +44 (0)113 261 5858.

Aframe 'Grows' at IBC 2012

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 13:55:00 -0000

IBC is the industry’s other must-attend trade show (next to NAB) and is also staged in one of the world’s other ‘Sin Cities’, Amsterdam.

Like NAB, IBC is unbelievably big. Colossal in fact.

So when Aframe were offered a late space to exhibit at the show, it would be a major challenge to ensure our modest nine square metres would stand out from the crowd. In the short time we had to prepare we knew the stand should be relatively easy to create, quick to gather the parts and most of all look completely different from everyone else in Hall 7.

Thoughts quickly turned to a garden theme and we considered sheds and summer houses as a way of assembling a structure that would be memorable and provide a meeting space at the same time. The idea of transporting a shed from London to Amsterdam then actually having to build it on site scared the living daylights out of me. Having recently watched a shed being built at home, I knew the work that goes into erecting them and with my meagre DIY skills how I could get it very, very wrong.

After agreeing with colleagues that we should go with a more open garden theme, we quickly set about ordering astroturf, fencing, plants, potting tables, benches and a range of other agricultural paraphernalia. By the Wednesday before the show started on Friday, we were on the road in a heavily laden van, through the Eurotunnel and heading north up to Amsterdam. With traffic in our favour we reached the RAI Conference Centre relatively early and managed to install the fake grass and reed fencing.

The show was supported by a range of favourable press coverage that would hopefully ensure good visitor numbers during the next five days, including Post magazine, HD User and our own Tim Burton being interviewed on The Next Web. We were also excited to start promoting our new UK upload partners, ClearCut Pictures and VTR North.

Thursday was spent installing the furniture and plants as well as connecting up the power and internet connection. Aframe would be demonstrated from two ‘potting table demo stations’, an industry first I hoped, some seeing Aframe for the first time, others learning about new features like our super quick uploader and secure video sharing. Delegates rested on garden benches, surrounded by plants, whilst sipping beer chilled from a coolbox housed inside a dog kennel!

Aframe is a Panasonic partner and so we also had to ensure our space in their Hall 9 exhibition stand was set up and ready to go in time for the next morning. The décor and purpose of this area wildly differed to the traditional Aframe demos we provided in the garden.

From Panasonic’s sleek and modern stand, Aframe demonstrated a novel cloud-enabled workflow using Panasonic’s new AG-HPX600 camera. Panasonic P2HD users capture their footage, create an AVC proxy version of it within the camera, and send it to Aframe’s secure private cloud network over the camera's built in web server. There, approved collaborators can access everything, anywhere and get right to work searching, sharing, storing and collaborating. Alternately, the camera team and the producers can simply store the footage there for later access and refinement.

As the show closed on Tuesday, all that was left was to roll up the lawn, tear down the walls and load everything back in the van for the long drive home. The garden was deemed an all round success and looks certain to make an appearance at future shows. Just with a lot more notice next time!

Here's a selection of our favourite pictures, but you can find the full gallery at facebook.com/aframehq.

Tim Burton on Aframe's Cloud Video Platform, at IBC 2012

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 11:46:00 -0000

At IBC 2012, TNW's Jamillah Knowles talks to Aframe CTO, Tim Burton about how Aframe helps its customers share access to footage, especially in areas where more than one company is involved in a production.

The full article can be found at http://tnw.to/k41K

At IBC, Aframe Shows Why Cloud Computing Is The Future of Video Production

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 06:50:00 -0000

In Sneak-Peak of Panasonic’s New AG-HPX600 Application and High-Profile Customer Projects, Aframe Spotlights Ways that the Cloud Saves Time, Money and Hassle.

LONDON AND BOSTON – 6 September, 2012

Aframe, the cloud video production platform designed to liberate the professional video production process, is showcasing the power of cloud computing to revamp the professional video workflow at IBC in Amsterdam starting tomorrow, Friday September 7.

In partnership with Panasonic, Aframe is demonstrating a novel cloud-enabled workflow using Panasonic’s new AG-HPX600 camera recorder, on display in Hall 9 stand C45. Panasonic P2HD users capture their footage, create an AVC proxy version of it, and send it to Aframe’s secure private cloud network. There, approved collaborators can access everything, anywhere and get right to work searching, sharing, storing and collaborating. Alternately, the camera team and the producers can simply store the footage there for later access and refinement.

IBC attendees can watch how fast a project moves from camera to cloud to Aframe’s platform, and how unique Aframe features speed up the workflow and put the creative back in control.

In Aframe’s own booth in Hall 7, Stand K39, IBC attendees can experience the production office of the future - a recreation of a real life garden, complete with grass, plants, flowers and even a gnome. The boothstand depicts the way Aframe users work efficiently from anywhere their footage is shot – organizing content from somewhere else in the world, then sharing it with others, knowing that everything is completely secure.

At IBC Aframe will also showcase its new video uploader that’s 15x faster than common cloud storage platforms; its new security options; and projects done for the BBC, MTV, Blink Films and more that typify the efficiency now made possible.

“Cloud computing continues to create a revolution in the way content is created, and not surprisingly Aframe has gained major traction in the past 4 months since we launched in the US and further expanded our networks there and in the UK,” said David Peto, CEO of Aframe. “At IBC we’ll showcase the ways we saved time and money for some high-profile projects and preview some reasons why the best is yet to come.”

Martians now have 20x faster uploads than Earth

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 09:29:00 -0000

Like a lot of people, over the last week I've been captivated by the technical marvel that is the touchdown of the Mars Rover Curiosity on the Red planet this week. The whole thing, from the crazy descent through the atmosphere to the frankly jaw dropping sky crane that stabilised everything before giving the rover the gentlest of landings, is one the finest days that NASA has ever had. Its captured the public's imagination to such an extent that there appears to be a drive to start a kickstarter funding campaign of all things.

I, of course, have been devouring every image that has come back so far - from the dusty image of a wheel to the first panoramic pictures (have you guessed I'm a bit of space geek by now?).

Curiosity has now deployed its main antenna - and we're going to start getting full resolution pictures back from the planet. Some of which are 2MB a shot.

However, to my eternal disappointment it is most unlikely we're going to come across any martians on this trip. However, I think I might have finally discovered why we never will..

Digging through the tech specs on Curiosity, I came across an interesting fact. The rover has a 40Mb data upload link back to Earth. This is just an incredible thing - we can link two planets together for high speed data movement.

If we can do this, then why on Earth (pun intended) can we not do this here? Global average Internet upload speed is just getting to the 2Mbps mark. Broadband suppliers shout about download speed all the time, but quietly keep our upload speeds down to under 10% of their download capabilities. As we all exchange more data, this bottleneck is only going to become ever more detrimental to anyone doing business electronically - and I'd argue, the economic growth of entire countries.

As we all start to put more of our data in the cloud this is holding back an entire generation of new companies. Thankfully, things are improving - remember - Virgin Media are trialling 1.5Gbps home broadband with a 150Mbps upload speed right now. So there is some hope. But for many people, it can't come soon enough.

Obviously here at Aframe this is something we care passionately about. We've recently launched our revolutionary upload system that maximises every drop of bandwidth you have (using technology that is remarkably similar to what Curiosity is using to manage the latency in its data link to Earth, one of our Senior Engineers has pointed out. Sadly, he wouldn't let me go as far as to put "Aframe uses space technology to move your media" on the front page of our website). This does however make us up to 15x faster to upload a video than Dropbox or Yousendit - and you don't need to download it again to watch it.

However, this will still be limited by the speed of connection you have (you can test that here).

We at Aframe love a challenge, and we have something in the works that's going to help you overcome this hindrance when you need to work with someone on your video quickly. Watch this space..

So - why won't we find any Martians? Wherever they are hiding, they certainly won't come out now. They've been busy watching every single episode of the Wire and Lost on Netflix, while uploading a millennia of home videos to Aframe. Sadly, as company policy is that we never look at our clients data, we won't be able to share them with you...

An early response to faster uploads

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 11:05:00 -0000

The response to our new uploader has been fantastic. Businesses and individuals across the globe have been testing the limits on upload speeds, file sizes and multiple concurrent uploads. One of the early responses we received was from Craig Campbell who tweeted the following:

If you haven't already tested it out for yourself, you can read more about it on our Ingest pages or signup for free and give it a go first hand.

UPDATE: Craig also tested 5 concurrent uploads, each of which achieved an upload speed of around 7,000KB/s. That's an upload speed of around 35MB/s! http://yfrog.com/z/g0scsdp

A new way to upload full-resolution footage

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 12:38:00 -0000

Getting big files from A to B. It’s a problem that’s as old as the internet, and one that countless companies around the world have tried to solve, one way or another.

If you’re in the business of making video, you’re probably more familiar than most with the frustration of trying to share something with remote collaborators.

[You could copy everything onto a drive, and have that drive delivered... but that’s still only ever going to be one viewer at a time. For each subsequent request, you’ve got to factor in another couple of days in transit and the cost of the courier. Time and cost - both can quickly add up.

You could try and upload your files onto an FTP server, and make them available for download. It’s become the norm, but it’s far from ideal. You’re often limited by the speed of the server itself, and only after a lengthy download process can you begin to review and comment on the media itself.]

Here at Aframe, we’ve spent a long time looking at this problem - and we think we’ve come up with the best solution for sharing video assets around multiple locations.

On this note, we’re pleased to announce the launch of our new, easy-to-use, fast and effective in-built upload tool. It enables users to get the most out of their bandwidth and is designed to be robust enough to overcome some of the problems traditionally experienced by people trying to move vast quantities of data over an internet connection.

By default, our new uploader looks to use UDP to send and receive files. This makes for a faster transfer, with enhanced recovery capabilities designed to counteract any dropouts in connectivity.

If your local network settings are configured in a way that does not allow transfers by UDP, our new uploader has smart fall-back logic built in to ensure that you aren’t left in the dark.

If the preferred method of transfer isn’t enabled, the uploader will automatically revert to FTP. If FTP connections are disabled, the uploader will use HTTP. This means that if you can surf the inter-webs, you can get your media into Aframe.

Using the new uploader couldn’t be more easy. Clicking ‘Upload Media’ will launch a Java applet in a pop-out window. Browse your local machine in the left-hand panel, and add files or folders to the transfer queue by selecting them and clicking the arrow pointing from left to right. Once you’re happy you’ve got everything you need, click on the green button to begin transferring the files.

Realise you accidentally missed a file off the transfer queue before you clicked upload? No problem! Simply add your chosen file(s) to the queue, and the uploader will pick it up once it’s dealt with the rest. The whole process is designed to help you get the most out of your time, as well as your connection.

Visit our new ingest page to read more about the uploader and view a full step by step guide, or click below to give it a try:

Here at Aframe, we don’t believe in making changes for the sake of it. We see this new feature as a major upgrade not just to our system, but also to the world of online video production as a whole. We’ve spent a considerable amount of time building, battle-testing and strengthening - and we’re proud to launch something we feel will make content producers’ lives easier.

Watch this space, ladies and gentlemen. In the coming months, Aframe will be announcing a number of similarly significant upgrades as we continue to grow. We’re straining at the leash to tell you more about them, but all will be revealed in time. This is just the beginning.

Aframe Delivers for London’s Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA)

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 12:50:00 -0000

Aframe Delivers for London’s Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) by Putting Video Footage In the Cloud

Save Time and Hassle By Using Aframe’s Cloud Video Production Network to Distribute Clips; High-Speed Ingest for Production Crews and Journalists Needing to Send Footage Back Home.

BOSTON, MA and LONDON 28 June 2012 - London 2012’s Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) had an Olympic-sized task to deliver – building new and temporary venues, improving sports facilities and transport infrastructure for the London games. When it needed to create and distribute promotional videos to accredited broadcasters around the globe – fast – and handle the demand that the Olympics would generate, the ODA relied on Aframe, the cloud video production platform. Aframe’s new-age workflow delivers broadcast-quality footage faster, easier and more cost-effectively than traditional video production and delivery methods.

Operational in London since 2010, Aframe recently expanded its private cloud network to the US. Aframe’s highly secure, exceptionally fast cloud allows professional video creators to share, search and collaborate without on-site equipment or full-time staff – anywhere, anytime – requiring only an internet connection. Aframe also provides “metatagging” services that allow a video to be searched via keywords, that greatly expedites finding just the right clip.

“Being able to work with worldwide broadcasters on a project like this would have been impossible for the ODA without a cloud-based system like Aframe,” said Neil Hatton, managing director of full service post production house, Azimuth. “We knew from previous experience there would be a surge in a demand as soon as it was announced to broadcasters. Aframe provided the necessary bandwidth to deliver footage quickly to the end user.”

“Since Aframe’s platform is web-based, it doesn’t matter whether the users are in Manchester or Manhattan to be able to successfully access the footage,” Hatton said. “In addition, Aframe’s interface allowed users to review the clips and only download what they needed.”

In early 2012 the ODA retained TV production firm SMS Media in London to produce a package of promotional video clips. SMS Media used Azimuth to produce the content, which featured HD and SD footage of the Olympic Park, including aerials, timelapse and various interior and exterior GVs.

Instead of using time-consuming and costly DVD distribution to circulate ODA’s clips, Azimuth used Aframe's online service to send ODA’s content to Olympic accredited broadcasters across the globe, including the BBC, ITV, Sky, NBC and CNN. Azimuth also used Aframe to add summary metatags to the footage, so that the broadcasters could quickly find and select specific clips by searching them by name.

“By adding metatags to the video, broadcast users could find the exact clips they were looking for using simple keyword searches,” Azimuth Post’s Neil Hatton explained. “This really helps in the process of putting news pieces together.”

"It was just brilliant for Aframe to be working with SMS and Azimuth on producing the ODA footage of the Olympic venues - a great team effort,” said David Peto, CEO of Aframe. “It really showed us all what a uniting experience the Olympics will be, and how cloud services are set to be at the heart of global media projects going forward."

As Olympic film crews, production teams and journalists descend on London, Aframe’s network is already being tapped to assist them both locally and in their turf – with high speed uploads and ingest of footage to be sent back home, and with faster, easier collaboration on broadcast-quality content for the London 2012 games.

# # #

ABOUT AFRAME

Aframe is a web-based service designed to liberate the video production industry by providing a shared, secure space for production companies, broadcasters, marketing agencies, and any business or individual working with the moving image. Using Aframe, producers can plan, create content, collaborate, store, edit, distribute and make footage searchable. Aframe aims to take the blood, sweat and tears out of content creation, without needing equipment or full-time staff, and only requiring an internet connection. For more information about Aframe visit aframe.com.

MEDIA CONTACTS:

UK: Simon Gannon, Aframe director of marketing, simon@aframe.com, 020 3301 7404

US: Mary Kae Marinac, PR Representative for Aframe, mkm@mkmarinac.com, 978-685-3136

Aframe Selects zColo for US Colocation Services

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 08:59:00 -0000

LOUISVILLE, Colo.– June 5, 2012.

zColo, a Zayo Group Company, announces it will provide carrier-neutral interconnection and colocation services for Aframe. Aframe, a cloud video production platform that provides a shared, secure space for professional video creators at production companies, broadcasters, marketing agencies, and any business or individual working with the moving image.

zColo will serve as the exclusive colocation provider for Aframe in the United States, with space and power at 60 Hudson St in New York and 707 Wilshire Blvd in Los Angeles. This solution will give US customers increased access speeds to Aframe’s cloud storage and video production services.

“In order to bring our video storage and collaborative services to the US, we needed a highly reliable colocation provider to house our servers and run our applications,” states Tim Burton, Chief Technology Officer at Aframe. “zColo was able to meet our needs on both counts in our New York and Los Angeles datacenters.”

““By locating in our highly connected facilities, Aframe will have access to a multitude of carrier and cloud based networks via zColo's direct interconnection ecosystem in the metro NY and LA markets as well as extending connectivity across the US via Zayo's dense national fiber assets,” states Steve Finnerty, Vice President of Sales at zColo. “As post production has become digital and evolves to cloud-based solutions, we believe our highly connected colocation facilities offer a great solution for service providers like Aframe.””

For more information on Zayo, visit www.zayo.com.

About Aframe

About zColo

Zayo Colocation Inc., also known as zColo, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Zayo Group providing carrier-neutral, interconnection focused colocation services in 13 domestic locations. zColo is the exclusive operator of the 60 Hudson Street (NYC) Meet-Me-Room and other interconnection focused colocation facilities in the NY/NJ metro market, Pittsburgh, Nashville, Memphis, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Minneapolis, Las Vegas, Chicago and Los Angeles.

About Zayo Group

Based in Louisville, Colo., privately owned Zayo Group (www.zayo.com) is a national provider of fiber-based Bandwidth Infrastructure and network-neutral colocation and interconnection services. Zayo serves wireline and wireless carriers, data centers, Internet content and services companies, high bandwidth enterprises as well as federal, state and local government agencies. Zayo provides these services over regional, metro and fiber-to-the-tower networks. Zayo’s network assets include approximately 45,000 route miles, covering 42 states plus Washington, D.C. Additionally, Zayo has approximately 5,200 buildings on-net, 440 Points-of-Presence (POPs), 2,300 cell towers on-net, and over 94,000 billable square feet of colocation space. In March 2012, Zayo announced its intent to acquire AboveNet, a leading provider of high bandwidth connectivity solutions.Zayo was recently named one of the Denver-area’s Fastest Growing Private Companies by the Denver Business Journal.

5 Things Your Producer Will Never Understand

Wed, 30 May 2012 10:25:00 -0000

1. Three letter acronyms

I bet you the Greek national debt there isn’t a Producer on the planet that understands the three letter acronym, particularly the technical ones. Partly because they are delivered by engineers, whose chief skill is neither people nor communication, but mainly because the engineer has just made them up.

Who know’s a ‘DDR’ from an ‘ADAT’? How about ‘EEPROM’? (check out this glossary of terms for a few pointers).

2. Costs and budgets

Normally the Line Producer or Production Manager talk to the Producer about the costs when the production is about to go over budget. Almost all Producers hate talking about money; it’s so working class, a bit like talking about how much you earn.

3. New technology

Producers never want to talk about or use anything new unless it gets them the Commission or it gets them out of an editorial or financial hole.

4. Not everything can be corrected in post production

There’s a famous saying in TV production: “It’s ok, we can always correct that in Post”. I blame the Post Production industry for this. At the dawn of production someone managed to save a show with their editorial and technical prowess. From that moment a whole industry shuts its collective eyes, ears and brains to the fact that you missed the final scene.

5. Missing the money shot

I saw this happen on a production where a team was sent to the other side of the world and didn’t come back with the footage they were sent to get. They had lots of lovely GVs (all of which could be sourced from a library), but not the unique shot they were sent to get. At times like this there is nothing the producer can do but spend more money (point 2), use new technology (point 3) or try to correct it in Post (point 4).

Image source: http://familypants.wordpress.com/2008/03/27/what-makes-a-good-producer-or-what-do-producers-produce/

A Beginners Guide to Camera Mounted Digital Recorders (part 2)

Wed, 30 May 2012 09:00:00 -0000

In part one of this blog we looked at the benefits of using a camera-mounted digital recorder. Now let’s look in a little bit more detail at some of the different products currently available on the market.

For ease of consumption, I’ve divided them up into price brackets.

Above £15,000 / $23,500

In this section we’re talking about the likes of S.two’s ‘OB-1’ and Codex’s on-board recorder duo, the ‘S’ and the ‘M’. All three record to expensive, proprietary (but removable) solid-state memory. Ideal for high-end cinematography, they can capture ARRIRAW and uncompressed HD (or wavelet encoded JPEGs) plus audio and, in Codex’s case, metadata. All three are at least 10-bit 4:4:4 and all attach to a camera via a mounting plate.

Codex’s M is for bigger digital cinema shooters like the Sony F35 and Arri Alexa and, as such, can deal in 4K Canon RAW from the new EOS C500 camera as well as ARRIRAW. The S is designed for smaller HD-SDI cameras such as the Sony F3 and the Canon C300 and has a dual channel option for either high-speed recording or stereo 3D from two cameras.

For around the same price the S.two OB-1 has a removable FlashMag that can store 36 minutes of uncompressed DPX file storage. Again, it works with top-end shooters from the likes of Arri and is fully certified for uncompressed ARRIRAW recording up to 3K.

Despite their price and size, neither the OB-1 nor its Codex peers have a display for playback or monitoring.

Below £10,000 / $15,700

There is a big price drop to the next set of recorders but we’re not talking low-end here by any means. For less than £10k you get a device capable of 4:4:4 colour recording and, as such, these are still for digital cinematography applications.

The names to focus on here are Convergent Design’s Gemini 4:4:4 and the Cinedeck EX. Both support various different codecs, record to solid-state drives and mount on the camera via at least a 1/4”-20 threaded steel stud.

Weighing in at 4lbs to the Gemini’s 1lb, the EX is much the heavier of the two devices but both have monitor/playback screens, so the trade off for that extra weight is that the EX has a bigger and better one (7” diagonally and 1024x600 pixels).

The EX is capable of recording uncompressed HD, DNxHD, CineForm and ProRes and does so to a single 2.5” SSD, while the Gemini plumps for uncompressed DPX and two slightly smaller drives (1.8” apiece). The latter has also recently been certified for ARRIRAW recording (via an upgrade).

Around £2,000 / $3,100

Now we’re getting to the kind of price bracket that achieves mass-market adoption. For around the £2,000 mark there are a whole host of recorders that will improve the image quality of your non-broadcast HD camera so that it can produce broadcaster acceptable HD pictures by upping bitrates to at least 50Mbs and colour space recording to 4:2:2.

Convergent’s nanoFlash recorder is popular in this section as is AJA’s Ki Pro mini recorder. Both record to CF (Compact Flash) cards and although neither features monitoring options, of the two, the Ki Pro mini, with its 10 bit recording capability, does offer a greater dynamic range. The Ki Pro supports ProRes (in its various guises) plus Avid DNxHD which means its files are instantly available to an Avid or Apple non-linear editing (NLE) system.

NanoFlash utilizes the Sony XDCAM 422 codec and stores files in either Quicktime, MXF or MPG file formats. As such, it should work with the majority of NLEs.

In the same price bracket you’ve also got Fast Forward Video’s new Sidekick (records 10-bit 4:2:2 to Apple ProRes and provides playback via a 4.3” monitor) plus Sound Devices PIX 240 (5” monitor, Pro Res and Avid DNxHD) and the Atomos Samurai.

The latter is one of the cheaper devices in its class but is far from the lowest spec. Using HD/SD-SDI only, the Samurai captures uncompressed 10-bit images to Pro Res (or Avid DNxHD via an upgrade) and has monitoring and playback options.

So there you have it. Other products are available but this should have given you a flavor of the camera-mounted recorder options currently available.

There’s plenty of choice and as digital production becomes the norm, they have a big role to play.

Missed part 1 of this guide? Click here.

A Beginners Guide to Camera Mounted Digital Recorders (part 1)

Tue, 29 May 2012 10:00:00 -0000

At the risk of talking in riddles, did you know that, as a television producer, it is perfectly possible to benefit from the immediacy of tapeless workflows AND capture broadcast quality HD images all without actually owning or renting a broadcast quality tapeless HD camcorder? Well, you can.

There are now a whole host of devices available that will gather uncompressed images from a camcorder’s digital output. This enables you to record them as broadcaster compliant HD files that can be instantly edited in your non-linear editor of choice (or, it almost goes without saying, uploaded to your favourite cloud video production service).

For the sake of this article we’ll call them digital recorders but equally you could call them external recorders, solid-state recorders, hard disk recorders, the camera-top-box or the ‘recording brick’.

Some sit alongside a camcorder like a digital version of the VTR while others mount directly onto the camera or its tripod using a cold shoe, the back of the matte box rails, a mounting plate or similar. It is this mounted variant of the digital recorder that this article (and the one that follows) will look at.

The camera-mounted digital recorder works, generally, by taking an uncompressed (or almost uncompressed) feed from either the HD/SD-SDI or the HDMI output of the camcorder. By doing this it can provide the user with significantly higher quality images than the camcorder can itself when it is forced to record (and compress) the pictures to its own drives, disks, cards, tapes etc using its internal recording specification.

Or, to use camera parlance, it can record to a superior codec with higher bitrates than the default codec and bitrate of the camcorder.

Let’s provide an example of how this would work using a popular HD camera, the Sony EX1. On this particular camcorder the built-in codec records to a 4:2:0 colour space at 35Mbps. By attaching a digital recorder you can up the colour space to 4:2:2 and the bitrate up to 220Mbps (or more likely 50Mbps to adhere to the UK broadcast standard for HD as dictated by the BBC).

Recording to that 4:2:2 colour space instead of 4:2:0 means you can record more colour information than the camcorder can. The higher bitrate means you get more picture information and less image artifacts (which is particularly handy if you’re planning to show the work on a big screen at a festival or in the cinema).*

In short, the camera mounted digital recorder improves the image quality of your camcorder.

Once it has captured these higher quality images where do they go? Good question.

Depending on which device you use the files themselves are stored in a variety of different ways. On some it’s the consumer standard CF (Compact Flash) cards. On others it’s 2.5” hard disks. On the high-end products it’s proprietary drives. And each device records to different codecs. The more expensive devices capture ARRIRAW and beyond, while Apple Pro Res (in its many guises) and Avid DNxHD are common on the middle and low-end devices. Best of all, some are compatible with lots of different codecs and you can simply choose the one that you need.

It’s also worth noting that some digital recorders don’t just record. There is a group of products, from various manufacturers, that also provide monitoring and playback options from the same device. We’ll explore the various different products in part 2 of this post.

Regardless of which device you choose, always make sure its recording format and codec matches your planned post-production route. If in doubt, check with your post house or editor.

So, in summary, when attached to the HD/SD-SDI or HDMI output of your digital camcorder of choice, a camera-mounted digital field recorder can:

Improve the image quality of your camcorder, turning a low-spec camera into a broadcast-standard shooter;
Capture images that are good enough for cinema projection;
Extend the life of a tape-based digital camera;
Allow you to benefit from the speed and efficiency of a tapeless workflow;
Provide the highest possible resolution images for post-production manipulation.

In part two of this blog (coming tomorrow), we’ll look at the different product options available on the market.

*For more information visit http://www.dvuser.co.uk/content.php?CID=277

10 Things You Should Know About Panasonic P2 Cards

Thu, 24 May 2012 12:00:00 -0000

P2 cards are re-writable solid-state memory cards that are used in various Panasonic camcorders and other devices for recording video footage.

Capable of capturing HD, SD, DV, DVCPRO HD, DVCPRO50 and DVCPRO 25 as well as AVC-Intra, they have been made available in various sizes over the years but are currently sold in three flavours: 16GB, 32GB and 64GB.

P2 cards are compatible with tapeless camcorders such as the Varicam 3700 and the HPX300 as well as recording devices like the HPG10 and the SPD850 and are fully interoperable with the leading non-linear editing systems.

Here are 10 things you should know about Panasonic P2 cards:

1) P2 Cards transfer data at a speed of 8:1.

In real terms that means it is possible, as an example, to transfer a full 32GB E Series card (that includes at least 32 minutes of P2 HD video) in less than four minutes. The data transfer speed is described as being (up to) 1.2 Gbps (gigabits per second).

2) P2 Cards can be used as an editing media.

This means that, although transfer times are fast, you don’t actually need to transfer footage to an external device or storage in order to edit it. You can simply edit directly from the card itself.

3) P2 works with Mac and Windows.

Because a P2 card uses the FAT32 file system and records to universally interchangeable MXF data files it is compatible with both Mac and Windows operating systems (as long as they are properly configured of course).

4) P2 records like a digital stills camera.

Unlike other recording mediums that store footage as video data, P2 cards record footage as computer data files, hence its universal compatibility.

5) P2 Cards are high-precision microcomputers.

It sounds a bit grand for something so small but P2 cards actually have their own RAID controller and processors plus firmware and gigabytes worth of solid-state memory chips.

6) P2 cards can last up to ten years.

If you use a P2 card once a day at half capacity they are reusable for up to ten years. At full capacity they will keep going for five years.

7) P2 cards are ‘fault-free’.

In a world where computers fail all the time it may sound unlikely but a P2 Card ensures a fault-free operation by doing a write-verification step for every byte of memory that is written to it.

8) P2 Cards are much more durable than other solid-state recording mediums.

Because they have a diecast aluminum construction and impact-proof connectors P2 cards are much more rugged than other, plastic and easily breakable, formats. They are also made without moving parts. This is potentially a huge deal as it greatly reduces the chances of mechanical problems and means they should perform in extreme environments and be resistant to temperature extremes, shock and vibration. Other mediums, particularly tape and hard disk that do have moving parts, are less reliable.

9) P2 Cards are hot swappable.

If you’re using a camcorder such as the Panasonic HPX3700 that can hold as many as five 64GB P2 cards at a time, you can record continuously for days on end by simply swapping cards in and out while the camera is still rolling.

10) P2 is versatile.

At the last count there were more than 110,000 P2 units in use around the world and it has been used on various types of television programme from Natural History (Planet Earth Live, BBC) and Children’s (Postcode, CBBC) to Gameshows (The Cube, ITV) and Drama (Moving On, BBC).

How to Transfer Digital Video from a Memory Card

Tue, 22 May 2012 10:29:00 -0000

With your tapeless shoot wrapped for the day it’s now time to transfer the footage.

Yes, in some cases, you can edit directly from the memory card itself but in order to free up space for the next day’s shoot, to create back-up copies of your footage or to get on with editing your programme, moving all your shots to an external device is very much standard practice.

Using Panasonic’s P2 as an example, read on for a potted guide to doing just that.

- Generally, production crews operate a ‘shoot now, transfer later’ approach rather than transfer on location. To facilitate this, make sure you have someone (an experienced media manager preferably) to look after your cards during the day and make sure you buy/hire plenty of cards.

- If you are going to transfer data on location, the fastest approach is to use a removable hard drive as you can get speeds of up to 500Mb/s. If you take this approach, remember to ensure that all your metadata and your XML or MXF wrappers are  transferred with the files.

- You can also transfer straight to a laptop computer. This can be done either via a built-in or an external card reader. To start the transfer process you simply insert the card into the reader.

- When on location, by transferring directly to a laptop featuring an installed non-linear editor you can do a rough edit, test special effects shots and even do a simple grade during the shoot. But be sure to use copies of the rushes and not the master files. These should be kept sacred and backed up in multiple locations.

- There are also dedicated devices for field playback and transfer such as the Panasonic HPG10 and the HPG20. This works much like a traditional clamshell field recorder unit and allows you to check the footage and metadata without having to have a laptop with you on location.

- Whether back at base or in the field, the transfer itself should be treated with some reverence. It can be done by dragging and dropping the files but this is not advisable as it can lead to the delicate file structure not being maintained. In short, you could lose your data. Another downside of this approach is that it does not support importing spanned clips, where clips are spread over two or more cards.

- Best practice suggests that for data transfer you should use the manufacturer’s recommended software. In the case of Panasonic it is called P2 Contents Management Software. It can be downloaded from Panasonic’s website and allows you to view and log footage, add shot markers and edit the metadata.

- With everything in place, to complete a successful transfer ensure that you have:

A fully labeled memory card of clips
All your metadata information
A fully tested device ready to receive the data.

- When you do the transfer, store all the media together. This will make it easier to match clips.

- Before you use the cards again, back up your files to at least one other separate external storage device and then test the cards to make sure they’re still OK.

- For archiving purposes consider the HP-G10/G20 (mentioned above), the Panasonic Rapid Writer or the AJ-SF100 software. The latter archives to high capacity linear tape, hard drives or even Blu-ray discs.

So there you have it. All you need to know about transferring digital video from a memory card and how to effectively manage your video files on a shoot.

Questions? Let us know in the comments below.

INFOGRAPHIC: A Guide to Sharing Broadcast Video Files in the Cloud (with Aframe)

Mon, 14 May 2012 12:19:00 -0000

What's the Buzz at NAB?

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 06:22:00 -0000

Catch Aframe CEO David Peto's interview with Laura Peters, correspondent for the NAB Show Buzz, which is powered by the Digital Production Buzz.

David explains what Aframe is, how to use it and who it's for. Hear the full interview here.

Our Week in Vegas

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 15:45:00 -0000

For one week in April every year, the city that bills itself as ‘The Entertainment Capital of the World’ plays host to the people behind the world’s most widely enjoyed form of entertainment, television, during the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Conference and Exhibition.

Las Vegas trades on its more infamous ‘Sin City’ tag to full effect with gambling, drinking and a variety of other, ahem, ‘pursuits’ on tap from just about every street corner. Not that the Aframe team had time to experience any of that as they took the company to its first ever trade show. For many of the 8 UK and US ‘Aframers’ in Vegas, NAB would also be their first ever show ‘on stage’, but what a debut it was!

Aside from the enormous success of the show (more on that later), NAB is one of the toughest exhibitions I have ever encountered – and I've spent a considerable amount of time in Earl’s Court and the NEC! For three and a half very long days (plus a two day setup), we were on our feet, conducting demo after demo, whilst the air con and desert air proceeded to desiccate us to wrinkly shadows of our former selves.

Aframe's presence at NAB followed a rather frenetic few weeks as we closed a $7 million round of investment, launched a US office in Boston, handled some amazing press coverage (including Variety, TechCrunch and the Hollywood Reporter), deployed our own private cloud data centres in Los Angeles and New York, launched a brand new Aframe website and animated video, hired brand new UK and US sales and service teams – all the while dealing with the challenges that such massive change inevitably throws up. However, these weeks of hard work preparing for the US launch gave us a fantastic foundation for the show itself. Many visitors to the Aframe booth visited us purely based on what they had read or heard on the show floor; indeed, many people admitted to being told to go see Aframe in action by their bosses. Cloud is a seriously hot concept in US TV production and many people seemed to understand Aframe instantly and some even signed up right away too!

It was clear to us all that NAB was already a success - we smashed through our lead targets for the whole show by mid morning on day 2! As well as a ton of new sign ups and great feedback from everyone who came to see us, we also managed to win a Black Diamond award from Digital Video Magazine and had notable TV luminaries Walter Biscardi and Oliver Peters write nice things about us.

Naturally our thoughts were of celebration, but jet lag, fatigue from the show and the need for industrial amounts of water and moisturiser took precedent! But, as the saying goes, “the show must go on”.

The IABM's Executive Interview with David Peto

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 11:34:00 -0000

David Peto - CEO of Aframe - talks to John Ive for the IABM Executive interview

David can be considered a pioneer of disruptive change. Following a spell as a producer, he was founder and CEO of Unit Post Production, which he proudly claims was the first entirely Apple and first entirely tapeless HD facility. Now he’s doing it again by harnessing Cloud-type technology to the benefit of the production community. With elements of creativity, technology and finance, he describes himself as a “Creative Tech Entrepreneur”. Clearly someone worth talking to…

First, I asked David to fill us in on his early career experience.

“I started out as a producer, initially working with 35mm film. The next step was to run a small production company with two colleagues, this was my introduction to high definition shooting on Sony F900s and Panasonic Varicam. Delivery was mostly SD but when our customers started asking for HD masters it was tough getting material post produced at a reasonable price in HD. This led us to build our own end-to-end HD Final Cut Pro system and with capital we raised, we launched Unit Post Production, all Mac, all FCP, all tapeless. During my time as CEO, we grew the business, added special effects and had some great clients.”

I was keen to understand what motivates a person like David with such diverse interests.

“The thing I like about building companies and starting something new is that I wake up each morning and have no idea what the day is going to bring. It can bring incredibly exciting opportunities or tough challenges. But more specifically, ever since I started working, in whatever capacity, I felt processes can be improved. I don’t have all the answers myself but I enjoy having a crack at exploring alternative ways to do things better, more efficiently and more cost effectively.

I'm in fact a bit of a closet geek who can communicate. I do have a creative background, went to drama school, but in reality I also love technology and what it can enable, including making the financial model work as well. People need to be multi-disciplined, it’s not just about being one dimensional, you don’t have to be an expert in everything but you do need an appreciation of the different facets of work life.”

So what were the drivers for Aframe?

“It’s really simple; our industry has a history of complexity. In fact I feel some people take pleasure out of making life complicated and this has been a barrier to successful growth. We have so many creative people out there, almost subsumed by the technology. I came to the conclusion; it’s all about the talent. So I set out to answer the question ‘How can you give anybody who has talent, from a massive production company or an independent freelancer, the ability to realise their creative vision without limitations?’ As I thought about it and talked to others, I realised we need a system that takes care of the ‘heavy lifting’ and the difficult bits of making video, something that is really easy to use. With this we can open up a massive new wave of creativity. That coincided with Cloud technology, offering world-wide collaboration with virtually unlimited processing and storage possibilities. It’s a reality now for many in their home using Facebook, Google and similar services. So why not bring it to the professional community?

Is this then a classic cloud-based application?

“Yes I believe it is, even though for obvious reasons we run it on a private cloud, we have all of our own hardware for security. It’s one of the new breed of companies giving you access to so much power and capability at an affordable price and to be used as and when you want, and with no expensive overheads when you’re not using it. In our industry, as in every other walk of life, people want to concentrate on what they do best. For example the majority of us drive cars, looking for good value, safe driving and in some cases speed, without having to understand what’s happening under the bonnet.”

But is this too much too fast for an industry still transitioning from tape to file?

“I see it quite differently. We’ve all been sold the concept of file-based workflows but the introduction has been painful. No-one has really resolved the issues that caused the pain. We have amazing cameras which produce great pictures but with huge amounts of data, on different formats; no-one has thought about how to deal with this from a creative’s perspective. We have competing and incompatible systems and complicated workflows. People need something that is simple enough to shoot whatever they want, work with it on their system of choice, located wherever they wish to be. They do have to accept that their “stuff” is not physically located in their office, for some that’s a challenge and a mental leap. It requires trust that their content is being cared for and managed professionally. Ultimately users should be able to select the camera, the editing suite and the graphics system to match their creative vision without worrying about the technicalities of storage and processing or compatibility.”

What changes does this mean?

“The creative craft skills will remain as important as ever, in fact the emphasis is back on those skills. It’s no longer about who has the biggest processing engine, storage server or best bit of back-office kit. It’s about ‘we have the best colourist, come and work with us’ with focus on creativity. What we take care of are not the exciting bits, even though they play an incredibly important role.”

How does this then affect the wider industry?

“Well people are still going to want to sit back and watch television. Linear television will not go away. However, the funding of programming is spreading wider with diverse routes to market and is no longer the exclusive domain of the traditional broadcaster. Programme makers will have more control over the programme rights and will want to exploit them in different ways. The new online portals are going to start paying for content and commissioning direct, it’s starting to happen right now with companies like Google. The industry will need to learn how to shoot and produce for multiple delivery options. Broadcasters still retain the ability to produce live events, entertainment and sports; they may well remain the most significant players, but not the only players.”

Should traditional hardware suppliers be worried right now?

“Yes and no! The world is changing fast but exactly how fast is an unknown. There are things that suppliers can do to adapt. Customers expect systems to work together, so getting hardware where it’s still needed, to work and interact with the new software layers is one imperative. There are great opportunities for companies that interface their specialist products with the new software driven environments.”

So who supplies your back-end hardware?

“Do you know, we don’t have any specific needs that limit us to particular suppliers. We buy servers and storage for companies that offer the best performance, reliability, price and support. Much of the hardware comes from standard names such as IBM and HP. There may well be specialist services that we link to, not necessarily on our premises, and we of course need a few specific products such as transcoding. But most of our value is in the software systems we are creating.”

So what are your next steps and challenges?

“This is just the beginning for us and I’m pleased to say in a short time we have attracted an impressive line-up of clients both big and small. We need to be fully focused on ensuring we support them with the services they expect from us. Their success will be our success ultimately. But looking forward, we of course have plans to further develop our services and expand our customer base. NAB will be a major milestone, so watch this space!”

Article source: IABM Journal, edition 82, 1st quarter 2012

Walter Biscardi and Oliver Peters List Aframe amongst NAB Highlights

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 14:46:00 -0000

Here's a couple of nice pieces written after NAB, featuring Aframe.

Walter Biscardi

"For remote collaboration, I did find Aframe, which is a new start up Cloud Collaboration company that seems to have both a great pricing model and a VERY simple interface. Actually ran into the folks at the Adobe party and then did a few follow up visits to their booth. I think we're going to start using them straight away for client reviews because the clients can enter their notes, timecode stamped, right into the videos instead of via email like they do now with Vimeo. Then we'll look to expand that to full collaboration with complete projects using all original media."

Read more

Oliver Peters

“An exciting newcomer is Aframe. They are a British company founded by the former owner of Unit, one of the largest professional post facilities built around FCP and Xsan. Aframe is geared towards the needs of shows and production companies more so than broadcast infrastructures. The concept uses a “private cloud” (i.e. not Amazon servers) with an interface and user controls that feels a lot like a mash-up between Vimeo and Xprove. Full-res media can be uploaded in several ways, including via regional service centers located around the US. There’s full metadata support and the option to use Aframe’s contracted logging vendor if you don’t want to create metadata yourself. Editors cut with proxy media and then the full-res files are conformed via EDLs and downloaded when ready. Pricing plans are an attractive per-seat, monthly structure that start at a free, single seat account.”

Read more

Aframe’s Cloud Video Production Network Goes Live In North America

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 14:09:00 -0000

Partnerships Add Eight New Aframe Upload Center Locations from NYC to LA; High-Speed Ingest of Full-Resolution Video Powers Anywhere, Anytime Access and Collaboration in the Cloud

BOSTON, MA and LONDON April 16, 2012 - Aframe, the cloud video production platform designed to liberate the professional video production process, today announced that its US private cloud network is now live and actively supporting the company’s growing North American client base. Operational in London since 2010, Aframe’s private cloud network allows professional video creators to share, search and collaborate without on-site equipment or full-time staff, and only requiring an internet connection.

Aframe also named a number of Aframe Upload Partners as part of its newly announced partnership with Panasonic (see companion announcement today), and as part of Aframe’s commitment to create an ecosystem of Aframe Upload Partners throughout the US. Aframe Upload Partners give video professionals a fast and easy way to upload large amounts of video footage as a first step toward using Aframe’s production workflow in the cloud. Aframe Upload Partners to date include:

AbelCine, with locations in New York and Burbank
DigiNovations in Acton, MA
Postworks in New York
Hula Post Production, in Burbank
Rule Broadcast Systems in Boston
WH Platts in Atlanta, Charleston SC, and Charlotte NC

Aframe made today’s announcements timed with the start of NAB 2012 in Las Vegas, Nevada, where it is showcasing its solution in the North Hall, booth #N 3222 K-L in the Cloud Computing Pavilion.

“We are very excited to have the support of such an esteemed group of industry partners, and will be continuing to add Aframe Upload Partners in the coming months,” said Mark Overington, president of Aframe North America, and part of the founding team at Avid Technology and its former head of marketing.

Already used by BBC, MTV, Giant Film & Television, Shine Group, Veria Living, and others in the US, Aframe remains the first private cloud, SaaS video production platform offering that eliminates many of the issues associated with full broadcast-quality video production, and is easier to use than Facebook.

Aframe saves professionals time, stress and money all the way through a production workflow.

“It’s high time our industry uses technology that matches our business model – that of far-flung project teams assembled from anywhere and everywhere in the world, and united by the cloud,” said David Peto, co-founder and CEO of Aframe, and former founder of a post facility in London. “Technology should free us, and allow us greater flexibility in the editorial workflows. Finally, with Aframe, it’s doing just that.”

Aframe is available as a free personal account, with professional accounts available starting at $99 a month per user, or an enterprise account at $249 a month per user.

The company is actively seeking additional Aframe Upload Center partners. Interested firms should visit Aframe in the North Hall, booth #N 3222 K-L in the Cloud Computing Pavilion.

Today is a Big Day for us

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 09:52:00 -0000

Twelve months of our lives here have gone by in a flash. And while you can't judge a company on the press it receives, we're really excited by the coverage we've got in the press today to our announcement.

And that announcement?

We at Aframe, who started from humble beginnings in a one room office above an alleyway in London's Soho, have not only closed $7M in VC funding from some of the top VC's in Europe, but also are launching Aframe in the US, with an incredible team leading it.

2011 for us was all about one simple mission - proving that Aframe worked. In the process, we helped entire TV series' get made in our cloud, stored thousands of hours of footage safely, and had hundreds of broadcasters simultaneously accessing content from our servers. This all included three world firsts, approximately 50,000 cups of coffee and a few extra grey hairs.

At the same time, we went on the hunt for the kind of funding partners that firstly got what we were up to, and second had a track record of supporting UK companies with US ambitions. We were extremely lucky to find those partners in Luke Hakes at Octopus Investments, Mark Farmer at Eden Ventures - and the very supportive Alasdair Greig at Northstar Ventures, who'd backed us since near the beginning.

UK startups frequently get accused of not shooting for the stars when building their business. It's something I've always found incredibly frustrating about the ecosystem (witness our Business Minister, Mark Prisk, citing Tweetdeck, a $50M exit as a highlight of UK success at a recent event in Boston). Ever since day one we were up front about the fact that when Aframe proved itself, we wanted to be in the US as fast as we could.

All that, and build our own cloud from scratch?! We must be mad.

Madness or not, we're determined that Aframe becomes the new way to create video content. And that we will be doing it everywhere around the globe.

Funding and a product are nothing without a great team - and we've always had one here since the very beginning. But it's not often that you get an email out of the blue from one of the founding team of one the largest tech companies our industry has ever known. But that's what happened one sunny day in July last year. Mark Overington, who helped grow Avid to $500M in revenue, emailed me asking, to my amazement, if we might work together. It's thanks to his work with us, that Aframe has got off the ground in the US so fast, and Aframe and I, have learnt a lot from him over the last 8 months.

So, we've already started on the next stage of our journey, and I can't wait to see what happens now. But underpinning all of it, is one simple mission:
Technology has got in the way of making video for too long. It's not about technology, it's about your talent. Now that everyone can have access to unlimited power to make video - that's all that matters.

Come join us, while we make that happen.

Aframe Expands Its Cloud Video Production Platform to North America, Fuelled by $7 Million in VC and New US Leader

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 09:06:00 -0000

Opens US Headquarters in Boston, Launches Private Cloud Infrastructure with NY and LA Centers; Facebook-Style Ease, Ubiquity and Collaboration Across Entire Video Production Workflow

BOSTON, MA and LONDON April 3, 2012 - London-based Aframe, the cloud video production platform designed to liberate the professional video production process, today announced that the company has launched its acclaimed Aframe service into North America. Aframe has established operations in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles where it has deployed the company’s private cloud infrastructure to support its growing US client list, while also better serving global clients like the BBC and MTV. The move gives Aframe local presence in the world’s top three global production centers – London, New York, and LA – where data centers provide the ingest and high-speed upload facilities to meet the needs of major video production, feature film, advertising and corporate projects.

Fuelling the company’s expansion is a new $7 million Series A round of venture capital funding, provided by Octopus Investments (“Octopus”) and Eden Ventures, with participation by existing investor, Northstar Ventures.

Aframe also named Mark Overington, part of the founding team at Avid Technology and its former head of marketing, as president of Aframe North America. While at Avid, Overington grew the company from an idea to $500 million in revenues, and established Avid’s nonlinear editing platform as the catalyst behind the industry’s shift from editing as cutting tape into editing as a fully digital process.

Aframe was co-founded by David Peto, a former founder of a London post production facility with a belief that making video should be about talent, not technology. With Aframe and the power of cloud computing, users can share, search and collaborate without on-site equipment or full-time staff, and only requiring an internet connection. As the video production industry embraces another transformational shift – to cloud computing and away from costly purchases of on-premises solutions – Aframe’s new funding and expansion into North America positions the company for rapid growth.

“Aframe costs us one-tenth of the purchase of a typical media asset management system, and lets our project teams easily access and create content from anywhere and everywhere in the world – something typical MAM systems can’t do,“ said Unmesh Khadlikar, head of information technology at Veria Living, a leading media company devoted to showcasing wellness programming such as “The Incurables” and “Rock Your Yoga” in the United States and beyond. Veria’s team has uploaded over 600 hours of video to Aframe in the past several months, using it to make promo versions of its shows and share content among collaborators in New York, Singapore and India. “It’s one of the smartest technology decisions we’ve made.”

“Aframe is fantastic for accessing our video content easily and quickly, wherever we happen to be. Whether we’re sharing pilots, sizzle reels or finished shows with broadcasters I know I can rely on Aframe – it’s a great tool to have,” said Tom Brisley, creative director at Arrow Media, a world leading content company, working across television, film and other media.

Aframe is the first private cloud, SaaS video production platform offering that eliminates many of the issues associated with video production, and is as easy to use as Facebook. The system allows for any original, large broadcast-quality video format in any length to be uploaded either over the Internet or at Aframe’s network of drop off points into Aframe’s private cloud storage infrastructure. This includes uncompressed raw footage, not proxies or intermediaries – a former impossibility given typical cloud computing constraints.

Aframe saves professionals time, stress and money all the way through a production workflow. After ingest, Aframe will transcode video and store it securely for teams to collaborate with multiple colleagues using document sharing, timeline commenting, video sharing and review and approval tools. Aframe also can handle the process of tagging media or providing users with a timecode tagging tool for their own use, which in turn provides powerful search so teams can find just the moments they’re seeking. The system also allows users to send links to footage hosted on Aframe for non-team members to review and approve.

Operational in the UK since November 2010, Aframe already has over 50 customers including the BBC, MTV, Giant Film & Television, Thumbs Up, Zig Zag Productions, Shine Group and others. It also has a fast-growing community in the US.

“Witness what Salesforce, Dropbox and Huddle have done in deploying cloud computing for their respective sectors. It’s about time that video production puts the promise of the cloud to work and at Aframe that’s our mission,” said David Peto, founder and CEO of Aframe.

“Finally technology has caught up with the creative process so it can enhance the video production workflow, while not forcing creative minds to change the way they work,” Peto continued. “The ease of use and flexibility that individuals have come to expect in their personal lives with social media and Internet speed are now doable in the professional edit suite. We are incredibly excited to expand our reach into North America, and grateful for the support of such esteemed venture capital firms to make it happen.”

The new Aframe US network will debut on April 16 with the start of NAB 2012. Aframe is available as a free personal account, with professional accounts available starting at $99 a month per user, or an enterprise account at $249 a month per user. Aframe will showcase its solution at NAB in booth #N 3222 K-L in the Cloud Computing Pavilion in Las Vegas, Nevada from April 16-19, 2012.

Luke Hakes of Octopus said: "For a long time now producers have faced a set of challenges and accepted them as being part and parcel of the process of video production. Aframe questioned the status quo. By leveraging developments in software and the cloud, the team has managed to harness and develop its own technology, which can significantly benefit producers by easing or, in some cases, removing these challenges from the production process.”

“The cloud is re-defining how companies go about their business across all sectors and the video production business is particularly ripe for this change. Now, with Aframe, it is beginning to happen. We are delighted to add Aframe to our portfolio of cloud based software companies,” said Mark Farmer, partner at Eden Ventures.

The Series A round brings the total investment in the company to $10 million, including previous seed and angel investments from former executives at Endemol, Vodaphone and AMV BBDO, among others. Aframe is actively hiring in Boston and in the process of confirming its local office location. The new funds for Aframe also will be used to expand sales, partner programs and marketing worldwide, and to add additional hires to the engineering and development team in the United Kingdom.

About Octopus Investments

Octopus Investments, founded in 2000, is a leading investment specialist. It offers innovative core and satellite investment solutions to UK investors, and a wide range of funding options for exceptional companies. The Ventures team at Octopus focuses on identifying early-stage business opportunities that show significant potential for growth. www.octopusinvestments.com

About Northstar Ventures

Based in Newcastle, Northstar is a venture capital firm with over £80m under management. Northstar has been inspiring local entrepreneurs with financial backing and the expertise of a highly experienced team since 2004, investing in over 200 pioneering, high potential enterprises. Northstar’s current active funds include the £20m Finance for Business North East Accelerator Fund, which is backed by the European Investment Bank and the European Regional Development Fund, and forms part of the £125m Finance for Business North East Fund. Further details can be found at www.northstarventures.co.uk.

About Eden Ventures

Eden Ventures invests in technology companies in the telecommunications software, enterprise software, SaaS, digital media, e-commerce, Internet, social media and mobile sectors in Europe. As serial entrepreneurs, Eden’s partners bring the highest levels of expertise in building early stage technology companies. In addition Eden brings a strong investment track record, offering potential for high returns in this exciting sector. Eden adds significant sales and marketing, organizational and financial focus and capabilities to the existing inherent technology value of its portfolio members. For more information, please visit www.edenventures.co.uk.

MEDIA CONTACTS:

UK: Simon Gannon, Aframe Head of Marketing, simon@aframe.com 020 3301 7404
US: Mary Kae Marinac, PR Representative for Aframe, mkm@mkmarinac.com, 978-685-3136

8 Reasons to Forget the ‘Good Old Days’ of TV Production

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 12:01:00 -0000

I once remember sitting in a meeting at BBC Entertainment with all of the production managers. It was all a long time ago when things were very, very different. Even then, they were bemoaning the fact that it ‘wasn't like this in the good old days’.

I, being the usual quiet sort of person that I am, had to say something. My voice was still in the process of breaking and I was a little nervous to be round some of the most respected Production Managers in the BBC.

“If the good old days were so good, we would still be in the good old days.” I must have sounded like the cockiest little so and so ever, yes, even more than normal!

Fast forward to last week at the DPP on the 6th Floor of the BBC (and probably at a few production meetings across the country) discussing different workflows for tapeless productions. Some people were bemoaning the new technology and the new ways of working with media and how ‘it wasn't like that in the good old days’ and “why can't there be just one workflow and one way of working?”

Fortunately the years have given me the good sense to ‘think it, don't say it’. So I held my tongue and remembered the good old days.

Things not to be missed from the good old days

1. Capturing on Film

Putting a piece of celluloid through a camera was fraught with problems. I don't miss taking it through customs and praying it isn't put through the X-ray or spotting a 'hair in the gate'. When the film is taken into a dark room I don’t miss someone opening the door at just the wrong moment or the chemicals in the developing bath not being quite right. A couple of days later you might find out if what you shot was actually worth it.

2. Editing on Film

An editor picks through each clip and manually glues them together, I bet that never had any issues and was really quick! Pity you couldn't broadcast footage from a war zone for two weeks back then.

3. Ingesting from Tape

I don't miss getting back from location and waiting 8 hours to ingest 8 hours of footage into the AVID. I suppose it gave you time to submit your expenses from the shoot (expenses – remember them?).

4. Having to go to the Edit

The only place where your rushes were available.

5. Waiting for the typed transcripts

They were delivered back to you on a bike and then you discovered that one page was missing or that they hadn’t started to look at that VHS yet.

6. The tape snapped

I once sat in an edit and watched an editor record over the footage. I kid you not.

7. Where is the tape?

I once discovered a missing tape propping open a door to another edit. A friend who used to work at the BBC would send out amnesty emails to all of the Sport APs asking them to return missing tapes.

8. Sorry, we don't know how to operate that deck

Some of the old decks required skill. I am told they used to VT edit using a razor blade and a magnifying glass. There was an old joke at LWT, what’s the difference between an oil sheik and an LWT tape op? The oil sheik doesn’t get London weighting (maybe that was the good old days for them).

Image source: http://www.mikefisherorganisation.co.uk/film-and-tv-production.shtml

Is it time to take the cheese grater to your video production budget?

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 12:00:00 -0000

First off, here are some jokes:

How many runners does it take to change a light bulb?“Shall I send a bike?”

So how many directors does it take to change a light bulb? “I don't know, what is the light bulb’s motivation?”

How many production managers does it take to change a light bulb?“Can’t they do it in the dark?”

For those of you that are either putting budgets together or managing them, there is always a moment when decisions about the production process will affect the way a show is made.

When budget negotiations are talking place, you are often asked if you can just shave some of the fat from the budget, “get the cheese grater out”. I am sure that a couple of you have just spluttered at the word FAT! What fat? Who has fat in their budgets these days?!

So when you are asked to start cutting the budget (or should that be gutting), what you are shaving off isn’t fat, but the things that you use to make the show to the high production values that appeared in the pitch document sent to the client, commissioning editor, distributor (delete as appropriate).

You normally start with the things that make your job easier, so that production coordinator that you so desperately needed has to go. Maybe that extra runner or the people that were going to log the rushes all go. You tell yourself that you will manage, though you don't know how. When it comes to it, because of the professional you are, it gets made and you tell yourself ‘never again!’

Here’s the thing; ‘cheese grating’ only works when you are giving a number to someone so that you get the green light. It doesn’t deal with the key issues you need to look at with editorial (speaking to the person who wrote the proposal and asking them to change it) or looking at the tools you are using to make the show.

Over the years, things have changed with the process. I can remember turning up at Youth and Entertainment at the BBC and they were using Hi8 cameras for additional shooting and for the look it gave the production. They were sending out researchers to shoot, they had the first AVIDs in the BBC and were reducing the time taken and the cost of post producing their shows. I can also remember the techs being quite unhappy…

To make that crucial dent in the budget, sometimes you need to be the first to use something and be a trendsetter. In years to come you will be the one with the smug grin, saying “yes, I was the first”.

To inspire you, here are my top examples of previous trends that saved time, money or both:

1. NLE – Avid was the first, but Apple is up there too because they made it even cheaper. Great for saving time during the edit.

2. Audio Network – paying for the 3 seconds of music your Director just had to have or the whole piece won’t work, used to be such a hassle. Now, just pay once, no alphabet soup of people waiting to be paid.

3. Mini DV cameras – yes I know that they have been overtaken now by file based, but Mini DVs paved the way. Easy to use domestic cameras took the job from expensive cameraperson to untrained less-expensive-person.

4. Predators – fairly new compared to the others, but a producer that operates and then edits on their own kit at home, independently of the rest of the production has helped take a massive chunk out of costs, but collaboration needs to be worked at here.

5. File-based delivery – possibly the most controversial of the lot? There are still a couple more links in the chain for this to really take off, namely dealing with the vast amounts of media that come from high shoot ratios and file delivery to the broadcaster. Work out a solution to manage the media and share it that doesn’t require spending millions on servers, and this can be a real new and we can be ahead of the rest.

6. DVD – Sending DVD by courier is the norm. Remember the days when the client had to come to the edit because it was cheaper than dubbing a tape and they might not have a player their end? However, FTP looks even more attractive now.

Managing Technology on a Video Production

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 11:59:00 -0000

Thanks to budget constraints and the rapid advance of technology change, the job of the modern day television producer or production manager (PM) is not what it once was.

Today, alongside their many other responsibilities, the people at the top of the production chain are being forced to get to grips with what used be someone else’s domain: technology.

In the ‘good old days’, the PM or producer knew that if they could make the logistics work, balance the books and hire the right people they – and the shoot – would be OK.

Why? Because until recently the responsibility for managing technology on a television shoot was someone else’s problem. Regardless of whether the programme was being shot on video or film, it was possible (and encouraged) to hire small armies of highly experienced and knowledgeable people who just took care of everything.

A sound recordist would record the audio. A cameraperson and his or her assistant would capture the images. The gaffer would sort the lights and the electrics. And an editor would take the pictures and sound away at the end of each day and cut it together into a beautifully crafted show. Job done.

Things have changed a bit since then.

It’s not simply that producers or PMs can no longer employ a camera assistant. In some circumstances they can’t even employ a cameraperson at all!

This means that they now must send a researcher or assistant producer to shoot broadcast quality footage and, as a result, they are now in charge of making sure that these junior people are properly trained to do so.

More pressingly they also need to be in control of where the footage is. And in this new tapeless era, that can be a big task.

In truth, the best person to look after footage on a production is someone who thoroughly understands how to manage data and how to store it properly so that when it arrives at the edit it slots quickly and easily into the pre-determined workflow.

In these modern file-based times this is the job of the DIT (Digital Imaging Technician), the Data Wrangler or, more commonly, the Media Manager.

These roles are fundamental now if producers and production managers want to avoid problems when shooting with solid-state, tapeless cameras.

It is possible for the producer to perform the role or to get an AP or camera operator to do it, but it’s not recommended. And here’s why.

On a tapeless shoot someone needs to do the following:

- Check the footage back to make sure that it is all there.
- Maintain logical and agreed file-naming conventions.
- Ensure all codecs, formats and standards match.
- Confidently duplicate and back-up the footage.
- Report any problems back to the floor.
- Liaise with the camera operators and shooting directors to ensure that rushes make it safely and quickly back to wherever they are being stored.
- Ensure camera settings match across all cameras.
- Liaise with post-production to ensure a smooth flow of footage and that rushes are in the correct form.
- Provide access to rushes for viewing.
- And so on.

Basically, dealing with tapeless cards, disks or drives is a bit like dealing with film stock. You have to be really careful not to lose or damage it.

Tape was fairly robust but accidentally dropping a compact flash card, for example, could result in it becoming corrupt. And that means precious footage is lost forever.

Dealing with technology on a television shoot has got more complicated as times have moved on. But, by taking the right steps, disasters can be avoided.

And one of those steps is hiring a media manager. Even if producers don’t have the budget for a sound person, a camera assistant or a gaffer, employing someone experienced to manage the media is worth every penny.

[Thanks to Dan Studley, technical manager at broadcast equipment hire company HotCam , for providing additional material for this article]

Why did you want to work in TV?

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 11:58:00 -0000

There has to be a reason I'm sure. People rarely "fall" into working in TV or film. After all, let's be honest, there are lots of jobs out there which pay more, don't involve such crazy hours or levels of stress. Nor do they have the same levels of competition just to get your first job. Plus, that first job might actually pay you something!

Based on all of this, there seems to be one thing that binds everyone together – they know that all their hard work brings enjoyment to a lot of people. And this tends to make them passionate about what they do.

Everyone has a slightly different answer as to why they wanted to work in the industry if you ask them, but it certainly isn't that they saw an ad in the local job centre and thought "I'll have a go at that".

I've just been at Ravensbourne College giving a talk on the Cloud and Aframe to 30 first year students. They are all absolutely committed to getting a career in the industry. They know the competition is fierce, the odds are stacked against them, and yet they are investing everything they have, both personally and financially that they will do it. Judging from what I briefly saw, they have a great chance.

Perhaps for these guys, but certainly for a lot of people, it's a light bulb moment. A documentary they saw and it really got to them, or a religious, fanatical cinema-going habit where they devoured the images presented to them. Or maybe they already knew someone who worked in the industry who came back with stories of times on set with the stars, or productions where everything went wrong but the end result was a hit, and it inspired them. And all of this could have happened while they were just a kid, and that inspiration just wouldn't go away.

After all this, it seems only fair to share my light bulb moment, as there really was one. I grew up in the Scottish Borders, where rugby is king, and if you didn't know how to shear a sheep you were at a bit of a loss. As a rather small, not particularly sporty (read – rubbish) kid this wasn't the easiest of places to grow up in. I bumbled along not really having much notice taken of me.

When I was seven, the time came for us to do our first school play, the Wizard of Oz, which would be performed in front of the whole school, teachers and parents included. I ended up landing the part of the Wizard, and set to rehearsing (as much as you do as a 7 year old) with the rest of the class.

I can still remember, completely clearly, the moment I walked out on stage and performed. Suddenly people paid attention and even came up and said how good I was. I'd found something I was good at. From that moment on, throughout my school career all I wanted to be was an actor. I got parts in any play I could, taught myself to shoot and edit (as no-one else would) so I could present or act in things, and put on plays.

A long time later, I went to drama school, got an agent and even got paid to do it for a while.

Now, you're probably thinking that what I do now isn't much to do with this anymore. Acting didn't work out for me, as it doesn't for almost everyone. But the love affair with TV, movies and adverts, in fact anything with a moving image, continued. And if what I do each day, can help someone else realise their dream, or vision then I know, that the frankly dull conversation with another lawyer or accountant running through a tax issue is worth it.

It might not be me anymore appearing in, or making video (and I do miss it), but what Aframe does is about helping those that want to, to have the power and support to do it.

The picture in this post is of me, at about that age, jumping off a bank in the lawn of my Great Aunt's house. It think it's a suitable metaphor for what those who make video each day do – take a leap and hope it's ok.

If Aframe gives you a safe landing, then that's great.

Bringing Classical Music to the Masses

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 11:57:00 -0000

This Saturday will see the culmination of a project to improve classical music audiences as Aframe helps stream a live concert on the Guardian website and to a series of North East venues.

Five months after Aframe was awarded a prestigious contract from NESTA, The Arts Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Aurora Orchestra debut at London's legendary Camden Roundhouse with a perfomance of 'Love Song for the City'.

The project has been examining how digital technology can increase the size and expand the reach of audiences for classical music. Many arts institutions across the UK are keen to explore ways of finding audience growth in the face of tough economic challenges.

The project will connect traditionally hard to reach groups and lapsed audiences to live performances. Using the latest digital video production technology, Aframe will provide the backbone to enable the performance by the Aurora Orchestra to be simultaneously broadcast via Guardian.co.uk and to audiences at the Alnwick Playhouse, Gala Theatre Durham and Berwick Maltings.

Aframe CEO David Peto said the event represented a landmark in cloud video productions.

"We're delighted that Aframe's unique video production software is being put to such good use in this prestigious performance. We're already privileged to work with some of the world's great TV producers and now we're also enjoying showcasing the amazing music of the Aurora.”

To find out more about the performance, visit the Aurora Orchestra's site.

Are Tradeshows Still Relevant?

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 11:55:00 -0000

As it’s the first day of the UK’s biggest Broadcast Technology show, Broadcast Video Expo (BVE) at Earls Court in London, I got to thinking about how relevant shows like it are in the age of web demos and online or instantly downloadable software. Their days have to be numbered right?

The two big shows for the Television industry are, NAB in Las Vegas in April, and IBC in Amsterdam in September (we really do choose the most terrible locations to have to spend a week, don’t we?). NAB attracts 90,000 attendees every year, and IBC around 60,000. That’s a lot of people from across the industry all heading to one place.

Whilst these shows have had an understandably tough time over the last few years, they appear to be bouncing back. BVE itself is the result of two competing shows having to come together - Broadcast Live and Video Forum. However, the new show is now actually growing.

The key to these shows, and their continuing relevance, is that video production is an inherently relationship based business. Deals are struck, be it the commissioning of a new show, or the purchase of a bespoke piece of hardware, face to face, and frequently based not just on the product but whether the buyer think they can work with the person selling to them.

However, this is one of the industry's greatest strengths, but also one of its biggest weaknesses. It's had to be this way because when you are buying a piece of equipment for $500,000 or paying several million to have a show made, the reputational investment from you, the buyer/commissioner in that decision is huge. If it goes wrong, you’re probably out of a job.

This, unsurprisingly results in technology companies gearing up to sell in this way as it’s that the customer expects. Hence, big stands, direct sales teams – and trade shows.

But – and it’s a big but, this method of selling is not going to last forever. The relentless commoditisation of first software, then hardware, and now the move to instant on-demand cloud services has drastically reduced the risk element of any purchase a buyer makes. If you spend $1,000 and it isn’t right for your company, the CEO, funnily enough, isn’t going to summarily fire you. Spend $500,000 badly, and they probably will.

Witness what Apple did with Final Cut Pro (the old, good one, not the new one). When they launched Final Cut Studio in 2005 for under $1,000, they understandably got hit with huge numbers of support requests. The professional industry, used to costly support contracts, expected the same level of instant response that they’d had from the likes AVID. When they didn’t get it, they howled about it. Apple politely pointed out that the product cost $1,000 versus $20,000 plus and directed them to the growing support ecosystem online.

You’d have thought this would be a disaster. But Apple sold 2 million copies of the program in 4 years, and the rest is history.

This same thing is coming head on at the other sections of the TV technology industry, like it or not. You won’t need to meet face to face, as you can try a new product with little cost, or even for free.

So where does that leave the trade show? It’d be absolutely incorrect to think they don’t know this is happening – they do. The days of huge stands full of hardware are definitely numbered – a matter of when, not if. So they are focusing on networking, conferences, VIP attendees, and the business models of internet tech shows like South by Southwest. Their seminar programs are getting larger and better designed every year.

If they continue with this, then there is great hope for their future. I go to them all, every year, for exactly these things – to meet new people, and learn new stuff. I get that from being in a room full of people who you know have in interest in say, cloud working.

So it’s with as ever, great hope, that I’ll be heading down to BVE this week. I already have meetings booked with new people, and most likely new conversations awaiting me.

Do I hope it’s even bigger and better than last year – yes – but do I expect to see it in its current form in 5 years time – no. Will the industry still want a big event where they can all meet and swap stories before heading out to the bars and restaurants where the real business happens. You bet.

Private vs Public Cloud

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:54:00 -0000

Yes, we know, we’re back talking about that old chestnut ‘the Cloud’ again. But it’s important that we do. It has the capacity to change the way television production works so we’ll keep coming back to it.

For the purposes of this blog, ‘the cloud’ is defined as online computing that allows users to access, via a web browser, applications and data that are installed and stored on a server somewhere else in the world.

Right now we’re going to look at the differences between private and public cloud.

It’s fair to say that there are varying degrees of difference but the major way that we differentiate between public and private cloud is in the location of the cloud’s deployment.

These are the two extremes:

If cloud services are available over the Internet for anyone to buy and use, this is public cloud. If the services are found behind a firewall and are looked after by a single company for the benefit of that company, it is private.

To coin a phrase, it’s all about location, location, location.

If you’re sold on the idea of using the cloud but you don’t know which of private or public is best for you, here are some of the Pros and Cons of both the public and the private cloud.

Pros of public cloud

You have no need to buy expensive storage or software so your up-front costs are minimal
You pay for your cloud services on a month-by-month basis
A third-party is responsible for providing all the technologies required for your cloud-based services.
You only pay for the bandwidth and storage you use
You can store a myriad of different types of data in what appears to the end-user to be the same location.
You can access your data and applications from anywhere in the world that has an Internet connection.
The cloud services can be tailored for you according to your needs.
Because of extensive back-ups and redundancy public cloud, should be more reliable than private cloud.

Cons of public cloud

You have no control over the cloud service’s basic operations.
If you store your data for a long period of time, it can end up being expensive.
Because your data could be held outside of your geographical area, sometimes on servers in countries with different data, security and privacy laws and requirements, the public cloud is perceived to be less secure than private cloud.

Pros of private cloud

You have full control over the cloud service’s basic operations.
The service is bespoke to your company
You control who does and who doesn’t use it.
It is very easy to scale up and improve your cloud services.
In the long term, the cost of operation can decrease.
Your data is considered to be more secure.

Cons of private cloud

You have high up-front costs.
Your company has to buy, operate and maintain the technologies behind the cloud-based services.
To extend the reach of your cloud-based services to people or companies beyond your own can be tricky.
Because of the firewall, gaining access to your data and applications from anywhere in the world is not as straightforward as it is when using the public cloud.
Hopefully this has spurred you in to exploring more about the cloud and how it will benefit television production for you.

Popular cloud software services like Salesforce.com, Google docs and dare we say it, Aframe, are somewhere in between the two; offering a public service on a private cloud. With these kinds of products, you get the best of both worlds.

Like this? See 'Lucky for some – 13 reasons to love The Cloud' blog

Do I Miss Making Video?

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 11:52:00 -0000

One of the questions I get asked most frequently, is do I miss being a Producer. As in, actually making video – be it film pilots, Corporates, TV Ads, Music Videos, all of which I've been lucky to have been part of making.

I always answer it similarly to this:

Do I miss being in a muddy field at 2am, when we just need to get the last shot, the generator's packed up, and it's started raining?

Yes I do. But equally, no, I definitely don't.

It's an odd answer, and so it needs some explaining.

One of the magical things about working in Film, TV or just video production in general is the seemingly instant ability for a team of people, who often have never worked together before, to suddenly become like a well-oiled machine. I can't think of any other industry that's like it.

A crew running smoothly is a thing of true beauty to behold. Set up to set up, flowing smoothly, the grips thinking ahead (while the DOP farts around tweaking his lighting – their words, not mine), the talent being shuttled back and forth, and at the centre of it all, the 1st Assistant Director, who is always a Brit, no matter where in the world you are, running the show.

When I did produce, I used to take it as a point of pride, if frankly, there was absolutely nothing for me to do. Except make cups of tea for the talent. Which as I was fairly young for the role, frequently resulted in my being asked to do the washing up as well.

So to take this back to why I do miss the muddy field at 2am, is that it's in these moments of crisis, that you suddenly get to realise just how good a crew you really have. Everything from new generators found in an hour by banging on doors, to rain covers fashioned out of gaffer tape, everyone's coats and some scaffolding poles.

Again, I can't think of any industry like it.

The camaraderie that comes with it, is plain to see in every pub and bar in Soho and beyond. The crises that at the time threatened to derail an entire show are now stories to be reminisced over and laughed about. Good times.

However, then there is the follow up answer, which, if you remember, was that no, I don't miss it.

Production, however well planned, well run, and how great the end product is, frequently is a process of lurching from one crisis to another. We all know there is never enough time, or money for any project in the first place, but everything always conspires to take it to an extreme. This usually culminates in the Post Production Facility having to throw everything it's got at getting the finished piece out the door and to air, and they are absolutely brilliant at doing this (I used to own one).

The sheer amount of stress involved is huge. I've seen production managers literally break down, sobbing under the burden of multiple projects, screaming matches, fist fights, deliberate sabotage and more. And before you ask, no, not on any of the projects I ran...

It was watching these things that galvanised me to start Aframe. With all the stress that comes with making video, wouldn't it be good to just know that at the very least, the most valuable thing you create every day, the raw footage, is safe, easily accessible by all of your team from anywhere, instantly, and continue to be so right from the first take to the end of the production and beyond?

If you can have all that taken care of, at the very least it means you are freed up to worry about something else. Or more hopefully, free to concentrate on being as creative as possible.

At Aframe, everything we do comes back to helping solve the challenges that we, and by definition, you, have faced as you go to work every day.

And if we get to the stage, where there is a line in your budgets that says "Aframe" and you can put a big tick next to it, breathe a sigh of relief, and go get your crew finding a purple Rolls Royce by Friday, that would make us very happy.

Give one of us a call and find out about the companies that have already done it – and ask us in the meantime for stories of what happened when we made TV and film. Trust me, we have plenty go round.

Like this? Go read Rory McVicar's 'From field to fork: bringing your ideas to fruition' blog

Choosing the Right Camera for your Video Production

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 11:49:00 -0000

There are many factors that go into choosing a camera for a video production: demands of the broadcaster; what the budget can stand; what the camera operator knows how to use.

But another factor that can sometimes be forgotten is ‘what is the most practical for the shoot?’

When I was Director of Production at Sky 1, we where pitched ‘Ross Kemp in Afghanistan’. The Channel had just decided all of its content had to be delivered in full HD and camera choice was still quite limited at that time.

Naturally, we all thought that if we’re sending someone to a beautiful, wild and dangerous place, whilst being the first show to be fully embedded with the Army, we should make it look sensational. So they were told to use a Sony PDW 700.

After 4 weeks of filming and months of careful editing, a special screening was arranged at the House of Commons in front of a group of MPs. A Q&A was held afterwards with Ross and some of the crew.

The audience had loved the show and asked what it was like filming in such extreme conditions. Ross didn't have many complaints about the conditions, aware that many of the soldiers he toured with were still experiencing them, but he did have one comment to make about the choice of camera.

“What idiot decided they should go into a hot zone with such an enormous camera?!” Or words to that effect. He likened it to walking into battle with a golf bag on your shoulder. It also explained why Ross, the cameraman and soundman (with a boom mike in the air) had drawn so much fire and had to walk two paces behind the soldiers.

One of the most memorable images of the whole series was not the beautiful vistas, nor any of the many gun battles. It was the camera on its side in the grass as the crew had just dived for cover and the sound of an RPG just missing their heads and the British army returning fire. The team carried on for the rest of shoot with the “Golf bag”, however later episodes and series used the more portable Sony EX3.

The one major factor in selecting the right camera for the job is fit for the purpose. Ask yourself: is this practical to take into war / down a mine / into a riot, preferably before the, ahem, shooting starts.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Paul Goodliffe joined Aframe as Chief Commercial Officer in 2010 from Channel 5, after 20 years at the forefront of UK television production, at both independents and broadcasters.

Managing tapeless cards and drives

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 11:48:00 -0000

9 things you need to know about file-based acquisition

The move to tapeless (or file-based) video production has not only introduced a completely new set of workflows to television, it has introduced a whole new language too.

If you want an example, just look at the different memory cards that are used by camcorders for recording instead of tape: SxS (Sony by SanDisk), CF (Compact Flash), SD (Secure Digital), SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity), XQD and so on.

And then there are the portable file-based recorders that you can attach to a camera in order to get a higher quality signal. These are made by Atomos, Codex, Cinedeck, Blackmagic, AJA and Convergent Design amongst others.

Now, while you don’t necessarily need to know how each different technology works in order to successfully embark on a tapeless video production, there are certain general things you should be aware of when it comes to choosing and managing tapeless cards and recording devices.

Here are 9 things you need to know about file-based acquisition.

1. The main difference between the various different types of sold-state recording media is in their read/write speeds. Read/write speeds determine the quality of the recording format that can be captured to a solid-state card.

2. When it comes to physical robustness, most solid-state recording media is the same.

3. There is a vast range of different types of solid-state memory card. At the high-end you have the likes of Sony's SR Memory Card, an SSD drive built into cartridge form that is capable of recording hi-res uncompressed footage at high frame rates.

4. At the lower end there are things like Compact Flash (CF) cards. Despite being cheaper they are still capable of capturing low compression HD footage from a wide variety of recording devices. Plus they are completely re-usable.

5. Portable file-based recorders take the HD SDI output of a camera thus avoiding its compression and low recording bitrate.

6. If you're using a camera such as the Sony EX3, the footage is only 'approved for HD acquisition' if it is recorded on an external file-based recorder.

7. When choosing a portable file-based recording device you need to work out whether the recording format and signal input are compatible with, and of high quality for, your planned post-production route. If in doubt, ask your post house.

8. Despite fears about solid-state recording and tapeless production in general, the ability to quickly make backups of footage on location whilst viewing and making notes is far more reliable than any weather sensitive and easily lost master videotape.

9. A media manager is recommended when embarking on a file-based or tapeless shoot. He or she will ensure that every shot makes it safely to post-production in the right format with the right file name at the right time.

__________________________________________________________

Why go tapeless? The advantages of file based production

From Field to Fork: Bringing Your Ideas to Fruition

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:47:00 -0000

You've spent x number of days/weeks/months/years on a shoot, working 18 hour days, living off Mars bars and Pinot Grigio, developing an almost familial bond with a group of people you'd never met before, all in pursuit of a great set of images and a compelling story.

It's tempting to become embittered at the end of this process. The star DoP leaves you with a milky-way sized media haystack, mutters something about 'coverage' and boards his flight to the Amazonian rain forest for his next adventure.

For you, the real work is just beginning... and what work! You know that somewhere in this labyrinthine mass of data, there's a story just waiting to be put together - but where to start?!

Cue interminably long days scrolling through endless takes, all the while fending off emails and phone calls from exec producers anxious to hear how things are going. It can take a Herculean effort to even reach the initial assembly stage, and even then, you're still some way off getting to the fun part - the truly creative part.

Wouldn't it be great if you could go into the process with some kind of head-start? If only you could break down the footage into chunks which make sense to you, with recurring themes and motifs logged and visualized for easy access.

That's where Aframe comes in. From the moment you start shooting, we can start storing. From the moment we start storing, you can start getting creative - it's as simple as that.

Factor in our tagging service, which allows you to search your rushes by keywords and you’re cooking on gas! Explore commonly recurring themes in your footage via a simple point-and-click tag cloud. Seek out and gather together clips based on character; or location; or whatever it is that you're looking for. Assemble the fruits of your (minimal) labour in a way that makes sense to you, and then share your selection instantly with anybody in the world.

All this means that by the time you hit the edit suite, you're not feeling jaded, or bewildered. Gone is that palpable combination of anxiety and dread. You're in control of the situation, and this control allows for a greater confidence in your initial decision-making. You know the story is there for the making - now you can focus on bringing it all together and telling it.

With Aframe underpinning your project, the transition from production to post is a seamless one - because making video should be a journey, not an obstacle course.

___________________________________________________________

Rory McVicar runs ingest and tech support at Aframe. He's also an accomplished amateur filmmaker and musician. Follow him on Twitter

The 6 Ages of Digital - digital adoption in video production

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 11:47:00 -0000

The digital landscape is evolving and developing. Over the past 18 months, companies have extended and matured their digital operations.

The 6 Ages of Digital illustrates the spectrum of digital adoption in the video production community. Not many companies are operating using all of these levels, but there are a significant number and they are growing across industry sectors.

Pre-Digital

There are not many pre-digital companies any more. Even tape based archives with content from the beginning of the 20th Century are operating with digital tape stock. Pre-digital companies are not server based, but they may have a computer based catalogue which might be online. These companies will digitise on demand – usually when a client requests delivery of media in a particular format.

Emergent Digital

Emergent digital companies encompass many small and large production companies and archives that are moving from tape based to digital workflows.

They are wrestling with issues around storage, metadata, security and managing their video data. Their rushes are typically delivered as files, stored on drives, local servers or in company management systems. Video might be logged in spreadsheets and programmes are delivered on tape. File safety is a concern and finding media is a major headache. Shooting ratios can be 70:1 and they don’t have the resource to manage large volumes of data, network connections and servers.

Digitally Ready

Digitally ready companies start and end with server based files which are ingested into a management system and are logged or tagged within that system with descriptive, technical, rights and management metadata. They have established a workflow which runs from production to archive on a single or a series of linked systems or workflows.

Digital Management And Distribution

Digital management and distribution refers to the systems that companies use to efficiently manage their video production and archive. This includes the ability to search and find the video they need, associate it with documents and to publish it to multiple platforms. Larger players, including the BBC and ITV, have been operating in this way for some time using a combination of systems and technologies integrated into their workflow.

Digital Intelligence

Digital intelligence describes the ability to discern what content is relevant to a number of different situations. Digital intelligence, as delivered by companies such as Autonomy, offers the ability to link content meanings. For example, a reporter writing a news piece for a major broadcaster would find it useful to see similar scripts and be offered relevant footage as they are writing the script. Intelligence comes through algorithms and with the rise of the semantic web, intelligent data will mean that video can be even more findable.

Multi-Platform

Multi platform content refers to content that is distributed on broadcast, online, tablet and mobile platforms. This type of commissioning is increasingly important, and forms a central raft in Channel 4’s strategy, for example.

Multi-Platform content relies on content reversioning and syndication: a long form interview may be broadcast in full on an online channel, clipped for short form channels, such as YouTube, edited into a programme for broadcast and transcoded for mobile and tablet channels. To efficiently produce and store this variety of formats depends on a ready digital infrastructure and asset base. To efficiently deliver these formats, relies on an efficient digital delivery system.

Summary

The 6 Ages of Digital are in operation in a growing number of companies. For companies that are digital from the outset, attaining this status is significantly easier that converting existing workflows, systems and archives. Nonetheless, many companies are choosing aspects from each stage that are relevant to achieving their own goals.

A company will start organising themselves, publishing and distributing on digital platforms without running a fully digital infrastructure. There is often a disconnect in digital workflows, so media will need to be moved from one workflow and manually ingested into another. This is not cause for immediate concern, but it is an issue that can only become worse over time.

As more companies operate a digital infrastructure, so the market will grow for software linkages between systems, platforms and workflows. Aframe’s online video production service is just one such linkage!

______________________________________________________________________________

Claire Harvey is Head of Commercial Content at Aframe. She has been researching and analysing the audio-visual archive industry since 2003 for clients and partners including Screen Digest, the BFI and ITV.

Online Video Production Workflow Scenario: ObDoc

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:45:00 -0000

Do you like Aframe but not sure how you'd weave it into your workflow? Our handy Production Workflow Scenarios are the answer to blending real world productions with our online video production tool.

In this scenario, you've got a tricky situation of two simultaneous location shoots and a shortage of memory cards. Plus you've got a Manchester-based Commissioning Editor who is worried about some of the footage you'll be producing and your budget can't quite stretch to all the time in the expensive Edit suite.

Situation

You’re producing an ObDoc about changing job roles. You’ve got a week long shoot in two locations at the same time, London and Bristol. You’re shooting on Canon 305, but there aren’t enough cards to last the week so you'll have to work out a way of rotating the cards whilst they are being ingested.

You have a PA in Central London and a PD in Bristol shooting 10-12 hours per day. You need to get your footage to the Editor in a Post Production facility in London quickly so they can start cutting the material. Some of the footage is too sensitive to be seen! Your Commissioning Editor in Manchester also wants to have a look at any sensitive clips in private.

Pre-Production

Set up your Aframe account: You’ll need a Business Account for 4 users @ £99.99 per person per month
Set up your Team. Invite the PA, PD & Editor to join your project
Upload the Production Schedule, Call Sheets and key dates to your Aframe project
Agree your Naming Convention with Aframe for Logging your footage
Contact Aframe to find out about a Partner Network for uploads in Bristol

Production

Location 1: Central London

Each day the PA sends the cards by courier to Aframe for fast ingest. Aframe will upload the material to your project then return the cards to the shoot.
Start organising the footage on Aframe as soon as it is ingested
Aframe's loggers start logging the footage with metadata according to your naming conventions.
Once you see the footage in Aframe, search for specific clips using the logs, create a collection of any sensitive shots and send a secure email link to the Commissioning Editor for review.
Your PDs can start working through their footage to create edit collections.
Add comments directly on to the footage timecode to get the Editor started on the stuff you like.
When the shoot is complete, the PA sends the cards to Aframe for final ingest. This time the cards will be returned to your Production Office.

Location 2: Bristol

Each day the PD sends the cards by courier to Aframe's Partner Upload for fast ingest. Aframe will upload the material to your project then return the cards to the shoot.
Start organising the footage on Aframe as soon as it is ingested
Aframe's loggers start logging the footage with metadata according to your naming conventions.
Once you see the footage in Aframe, search for specific clips using the logs, create a collection of any sensitive shots and send a secure email link to the Commissioning Editor for review.
Your PDs can start working through their footage to create edit collections.
Add comments directly on to the footage timecode to get the Editor started on the stuff you like.
When the shoot is complete, the PD sends the cards to Aframe's Partner Upload for final ingest. This time the cards will be returned to your Production Office.

Post-Production

Aframe's loggers finish logging your footage. The whole Production Team can now easily search and review the footage.
Upload your footage into your Edit

Conclusion

Putting Aframe at the heard of this potentially complex workflow made the production more cost-efficient, quicker, safer and better quality:

The company saved money by recycling memory cards, getting material to the editor more quickly and not sending review copies on DVDs across the country.
The production schedule was shorter because the crew didn't have to wait so long for review and approval of video and the edit could start more quickly.
The team were already organising the footage before the edit, thereby saving valuable time and budget
The Commissioning Editor could review and approve all of the sensitive material right after it was shot, reducing the potential for delay.
All of the rushes were ingested into Aframe daily, so the whole shoot was securely back up in the Cloud.
The entire crew could access the footage after ingest, allowing them to comment on it and therefore improving the quality of the final show.

Learn how Aframe can make video productions easy.

How to Sell a TV Programme

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 11:44:00 -0000

My favourite film is Glengarry Glen Ross. When I say it’s my favourite film, I have actually only seen 7 minutes 23 seconds of it... the bit where Alec Baldwin gives a pep talk to a real estate sales team.

To me it’s pretty inspiring as a salesperson. But even if your core role is not sales, having the skills to sell are invaluable in most walks of life, not least in selling TV shows.

At one point Alec spins a blackboard round with ABC “Always Be Closing” written on it. He repeats it, twice. There’s nothing surprising in the statement, but the amount of opportunities that come and then quickly go because someone does not land the deal (or even get close to landing the deal) is very disheartening.

If you are in sales, or in selling mode, closing should be your main purpose in life, followed by retaining the customer, upselling and repeat business.

Have you ever experienced ‘expert-itus’? Everything has been going well, the salesperson is getting along with the customer almost too well and they start over-selling. The customer goes from keen; to ready to buy; to still interested, but a bit baffled; to bemused until boredom sets in and eventually they are a lost sale.

I was once told a story about a sales meeting where a client took out a cheque book (remember those?), opened it to write a cheque, then after 10 minutes closed it and put it away without the salesmen even noticing. Salespeople are guilty of many things, but talking too much, giving too much information and not knowing when to shut up are the worst sins in my book.

So here are my four tips for ABC:

Hear, hear

There is a saying that we listen to interrupt. It means that most people in business meetings are just waiting for their moment to jump in and say their piece.
A good salesperson this does not make.
Instead, use active listening skills:

repetition to show you understand
paraphrasing to summarise
if necessary rephrase their words to take control of a conversation.

If you don't understand the customer, don’t be afraid to ask for clarification. Check details but don't overdo it. Take notes if you need to. By practising active listening, the customer may take you off your prepared script, but they will drop clues and opportunities for you to take them back. Be patient.

Watch out

If you are in front of the customer then use the advantage of reading the signals they are giving off. If they are crying or they are asleep, they might not be in the correct state to be closed yet. Positive signals like sitting forward and maintaining eye contact are your cues to think about closing.

Keep Schtum

When you have used a closing technique or statement, pause and wait for the customer to respond. Don’t be tempted to talk to fill the silence. I was once told that a conversation can stand eight seconds of silence. Not sure what happens after that; maybe one of the parties breaks into song or bursts into flames. You never know, the client might even say yes.

Use your nose

I’m sorry not going to say anything here about smelling a deal. Avoid picking it and don’t touch it – it’s a tell-tale signal that you might not be telling the whole truth.

Remember: ABC – Always Be Closing

Paul Goodliffe joined Aframe as Chief Commercial Officer in 2010 from Channel 5, after 20 years at the forefront of UK television production, at both independents and broadcasters.

Lucky for some – 13 reasons to love The Cloud

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:13:00 -0000

Having moved from IT buzzword to practical reality within the space of just a few years, the cloud* now has the potential to completely transform how companies handle their IT.

And we’re not just talking about financial, government or corporate entities. It is relevant to video production companies too, especially because so much of that process now uses digital files.

For Aframe, the cloud is an essential technological philosophy that drives our business. So here are some general advantages of the cloud, many of which are already being exploited by video production companies:

1. The Cloud allows for simple sharing

Because all IT resources are consolidated in one place and accessed via a web-based user interface, lots of users can share the same infrastructure and information. This makes usage and access easier, potentially saving businesses both time and money.

2. The Cloud is very flexible

With shared resources, companies can distribute their IT to staff or users in a very agile way, moving from a one-size-fits-all approach to bespoke set-ups.

3. The cost of the Cloud can be managed effectively

As a result of the ability to share resources, companies can handle the cost of their IT in a more even-handed way and potentially save money as a result.

4. The Cloud is very versatile

Companies can adopt a hybrid approach to the cloud by employing existing local infrastructure to develop and rollout cloud-based applications.

5. The Cloud can grow and shrink

Extra computer resources can be added (or subtracted) on-demand as and when applications or people need them.

6. The Cloud provides plenty of back up

The Cloud places information across a large number of servers. This provides very high levels of both reliability and, importantly, availability.

7. The Cloud is ideal for services

Lower overheads and faster deployment time means services can go live quickly and easily.

8. The Cloud is Pay As You Go

Companies that use the cloud only pay for the services that they actually use. This is done either via a subscription or one-off transactions.

9. The Cloud can increase automation

Because the cloud virtualizes IT resources as a service it requires an Application Programming Interface (API). This API can be designed to automatically add, reconfigure or remove cloud infrastructure based on the amount of traffic, recent outages etc. It can also be used to enable functionality that the end-users will interact with. These could include shopping carts, wikis, widgets and other web-based tools that are familiar to them.

10. The Cloud reduces the need for upgrades

Because software and hardware are centralized, there is no longer a need to upgrade personal computer memory or versions of software. Instead, the server is updated and all users benefit at the same time.

11. The Cloud makes work mobile

Users can connect to their cloud-based applications and data from any computer in the world (and in some cases from any device) as long as they have an Internet connection. This allows for serious mobility for a workforce.

12. The Cloud does away with downloads

Using the cloud means that there is little need for downloads, therefore saving both time spent waiting for downloads and on hard disk drive space.

13. The Cloud will not get stolen

Unlike a portable hard drive, cloud servers are unlikely to be lost or stolen. And even if your applications are not hosted in the cloud, back-up copies of work can be stored there for security purposes.

* To avoid any confusion, for the purposes of this blog, ‘the cloud’ is defined as: online computing that allows users to access, via a web browser, applications and data that are installed and stored on a server somewhere else in the world.

How long will my upload take?

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 11:42:00 -0000

Our sales and service teams are asked this question a lot. Naturally, once a client has decided to use the world’s first online video production service, they understandably want their footage online right away. We have several ways of ingesting media:

Get the media to us at our Covent Garden offices on a hard drive
Use FTP to drag and drop the files you want to upload online
Use the web uploader, we recommend uploading no more than 1GB of video at a time

Dropping a drive round to us is fine if you’re in London and pretty centrally located, but increasingly clients are using us from further afield. Many people are having success using our FTP, which allows you to get footage into (and out of) your project.

But what if you upload footage using the web uploader? How long will that take?

The answer (to the question in the title of this post) depends on the speed of your internet connection. Actual internet speed varies according to a number of factors, so you’ll first need to understand what speeds you’re actually getting. There are several sites offering this service; speedtest.net, broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk and internet-speedtest.net are all good.

The test will give you an estimate for your current download and upload speeds. These may vary at different times of day and whether you are connecting wirelessly or hard-wired (Aframe's wireless internet upload speed is 4 times slower than when hard-wired).

Next you need to understand the size of the video files you will be uploading. If they’re not on a hard drive or your computer then use videospaceonline.com to find out the file size. You’ll need to know the file format and the length of your video.

Those lovely chaps at Google have provided a neat way of calculating the upload time. Enter the following formula straight into the search bar:

File size / Upload speed / sec

File size can be in MB, GB or even TB. Upload speed should be in Mb/sec (Megabits per second). It then shows you how long it will take to upload your file. The Google calculator even adjusts the time measurement so it’s in a useable timeframe. So to upload a 5 minute clip of XDCAM footage (950MB) on a 1.68 Mb/sec line will take 1¼ hours:

This doesn't take into account things that might slow the process down like your computer's speed or changes in internet connectivity.

If you have any questions about uploading video to Aframe, give us a call, drop us an email or tweet us.

Why go tapeless? The advantages of file based production

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 11:41:00 -0000

If the marketing departments of the broadcast industry’s camera manufacturers are to be believed, tapeless production is the holy grail of television: it will save you money, make your production more efficient and (probably) make you taller, slimmer and better looking all at the same time.

The truth is, while going tapeless has a myriad of advantages, there are a whole host of things to consider when deciding on which file-based camera or format to use for your next television series. And reading the marketing blurb from the manufacturers will probably not provide you with the most objective starting point.

Based on the opinions of camera operators, production managers and producers, here are some of the major vendor neutral ‘real world’ benefits of tapeless cameras and tapeless working:

Going tapeless virtually eliminates the need for DVD transfers
Duplication costs are also redundant as footage can be backed up and stored in several different places at almost no cost
Footage can be automatically (or remotely) logged at the same as it is captured
Metadata can be added to files from just about any computer or mobile device
It is possible to get (almost) instant access to each and every shot for viewing, logging and editing or fast distribution via the Internet
Tapeless ingest is faster than real time
Footage sales can be given a boost as archive shots are easy to identify, catalogue and find
The camera ‘buffer’ on tapeless camcorders records 10 seconds before the record button is activated, so you should never miss a shot
Rushes can be viewed from anywhere and on just about any device
Money can be saved on courier costs and tape deck hire
As a rule, tapeless cameras are cheaper to buy than tape-based ones
Re-used correctly, tapeless media can work out cheaper than tape stock
Digital media recordings are likely to be less jittery than tape-based ones
It is easier/possible/practical to edit whilst still on-location

In short, tapeless production has the potential to: reduce the cost of acquisition materials; quicken the time it takes to make a show; aid the production team by giving them better control over the footage they've shot; and improve the ways in which footage can be re-used and exploited further down the line.

Tapeless is not for everyone. And the benefits are not automatic. Plus, there are also downsides to tapeless production (although that’s a topic for another time).

But, with the correct planning and the right tools, tapeless production can be your holy grail by making your production cheaper, faster and more efficient. It is unlikely to make you better looking though.

Care to share your experiences of tapeless? Is it the Utopia you were expecting?

Getting a TV Programme Commissioned - 10 Tips for Success

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 11:39:00 -0000

1. Know who you are pitching to

Just like Dragons' Den, if you haven't taken the time to Google the commissioner and their channel you are going to look like you don’t care. Commissioners will often ask people what they think of the channel and what shows they like, so it’s a good idea to have a watch of their channel the night before.

2. If they are speaking, you are listening

It doesn't matter how good your idea is, speaking over the person you are trying to sell is just rude and will only hamper your chances.

3. Access is everything

If you are pitching a show with amazing access to someone or somewhere, make sure you have the necessary agreement to do so. If you promise the access and haven't even started the process of getting it, you are going to come unstuck if you get commissioned on the spot. I have seen it happen. Your next idea won’t even get a look in.

4. Be realistic

Be sensible about what the channel can afford to make. I’m sure any commissioner would jump at the idea of remaking Ben Hur, but if their average viewing figures are 75,000 per hour, their ad/sub venue might not cover it.

5. Listen to their ideas

Be prepared to listen to the commissioner’s ideas about what would make the show work on their channel. Remember you are pitching to someone who lives the channel 24/7 and they will have research proving what works for their viewers. Working together helps them champion your idea because people support what they help to create. Oh, but don’t rollover on everything the commissioner suggests. They might think you’re a bit of a pushover.

6. Be flexible

If you have a killer show but no experience, you may be asked to hire a producer they know or partner with a production company they have worked with before. Go with it. For them, it’s all about reducing risk and improving the chance of a return on investment.

7. Have a throw-away idea

I have been in commissioning meetings and after listening to three ideas, everyone has made nice noises, but you knew nothing will come of them. On the way to the door someone says “would blah blah work for you?” Immediately everyone sat back down and we were off. Be careful you can deliver if you use this one…

8. Believe in what you are pitching

Yes I know that is bloody obvious, but commissioners can smell the BS before it gets to the front door. They spend their whole lives being pitched to, so will be looking for commitment and passion from you just as much as a great presentation.

9. Deal with rejection

Some of the best ideas for telly have been through several rounds of rejection. Rejection is a fact of life if you are trying to get commissioned and the quicker you learn to deal with it, the better. Being rejected by a commissioner isn’t a personal affront (unless you did something stupid of course). That good idea can be taken to another commissioner, though it’s always a good idea to take all the references to the other channel off the pitch. Everyone wants to feel special, even commissioners.

10. Why not be the first?

Lots of ideas get commissioned because they are a bit like something else. Deal or No Deal is a bit like Take Your Pick; Location, Location, Location is a bit like Escape to the Country and don’t get me started on the bloomin’ X Factor! So why not be the one that goes in with a totally original idea?

Someone once said to me that there’s nothing new in telly. Please, I beg of you, prove them wrong.

Paul Goodliffe joined Aframe as Chief Commercial Officer in 2010 from Channel 5, after 20 years at the forefront of UK television production, at both independents and broadcasters.

Going tapeless - 10 top tips for a successful switch

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 11:38:00 -0000

For television producers that have spent their careers happily moving boxes of videotapes around, the transition to file-based (tapeless) video production can be something of a challenge.

Not only is there is a completely new way of working to get familiar with and a fresh set of technologies to get used to, there is also a whole new language required to articulate it.

And then there’s the innate fear of knowing that your precious, irreplaceable video footage no longer exists in a physical form that you know and trust but simply inhabits a mystical, magical space somewhere in the realm of digital’s limitless zeros and ones.

But don’t fret. It can be done. Here are ten tips for a successful switch to tapeless.

1. Ask questions

If you don’t ‘get’ tapeless, say so. It’s much easier to start from scratch with an admittance of ignorance than it is to try to muddle your way through and get someone to rescue you. Ask peers, camera operators, hire firms and post houses for advice BEFORE you start planning your shoot. Going tapeless should certainly not be an after-thought.

2. Trust your hire company

There’s a very good chance that the company that you hire your cameras from will be very familiar with file-based workflows. They will be able to provide you with vital tapeless information such as which formats will and won’t be accepted by broadcasters. This, in turn, will help you to determine which tapeless cameras are most suitable for your project.

3. Do a workflow test

Even if the schedule is tight, make sure you do a simple workflow test in advance of the shoot. This will help you to iron out any potential problems and avoid disasters further down the line.

4. Keep your post house in the loop

From a post-production perspective there’s little worse than a producer turning up with his or her tapeless footage saved in a myriad of formats, codecs and frame rates and using a mixture of file-naming conventions. This is the ultimate ‘fix it in post’ crisis but, with tapeless, sometimes it cannot be fixed. To avoid this scenario, take advice from your post house at the outset, set your parameters and conventions and every time you change a component or setting within your workflow let post-production know about it.

5. Make sure everyone on the team is up-to-speed

From runner to exec, your whole production team needs to understand the new tapeless way of working. They also need to be made aware of the benefits. As an example, when it comes to approval, the exec should be made aware that he or she probably will not be viewing a tape or a DVD. Instead they could be seeing a proxy version of the rushes on their desktop.

6. Employ experienced crew

Whether you are a tapeless novice or not, it is always worth bringing on board people that have worked on tapeless shoots before. It sounds obvious but they will not only be able to hit the ground running, they’ll also be able to guide you through the tough times.

7. Employ a media manager

An experienced media manager will be worth his or her weight in gold. They will do all the house keeping for you, looking after the masses of media so that footage ends up in the right place at the right time and that cards or discs are not accidentally wiped or footage transferred to the wrong format.

8. Factor in time (and budget) for back-ups and transfers

Allow enough time throughout the shoot for transferring your footage to portable hard drives (or the cloud) and to back up all your media. This doesn’t necessarily have to happen on location but it should be done regularly and be an integral part of your schedule. Also, if you haven’t got a media manager or a data wrangler on your crew, please don’t expect your cameraperson to do transfers overnight after enduring a 12-hour shoot. Instead, factor in extra time for that process on another day.

9. Don’t treat cards like tape stock

The cards and discs that are used for file-based acquisition are expensive. The prices are coming down all the time but compared to tape, there’s no comparison. So, as a result, be very careful with how you use them. It can be useful to consider the cards as part of the price of the camera rather than as stock. Then, work out in advance how many cards you will need for your shoot and transfer your footage at regular intervals so you can re-use them.

10. Don’t Panic

Going tapeless sounds a lot more complicated than it really is.

Good luck.

10 Tips for Managing a TV Production Budget

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 11:36:00 -0000

Now’s the time to get on with that production budget for that show you’ve been talking about. The haze of parties and pre-Christmas hangovers wasn’t the time to do it: oh no. Now the phone isn't ringing as much, there are fewer interruptions and you’re much more in the right frame of mind. Not quite working out for you? Here to help is Paul Goodliffe and his top 10 tips for creating and managing a television production budget.

1. Understand the show

I know some production managers won’t look at formats they haven't worked on before and I suppose that makes a lot of sense if you are doing a Hollywood blockbuster or any major infrastructure type show. However, in these times you need to take anything don’t you? It’s worth asking questions and don't stop until you totally understand the show and what the execs want to achieve. Better to ask too many than to few and you get found out. Also if you and the exec are having trouble communicating now, what will happen during production?

2. Be Honest

Be totally honest with yourself and the production team. Telling them it can’t be done on the money isn't helpful, but telling them what can be done for the money, is.

3. Get everyone’s agreement on deliverables and budgets

So you’ve got a broadcaster that is prepared to pay for the whole show? Well done you!! However, it’s more likely that the show is being part-funded by several different parties, all wanting something different and all wanting you to report on it in a slightly different way. Make sure you understand everyone’s deliverables from the start and ensure they can see what they are asking for in the budget. Get everyone to agree the cashflow while you’re at it.

4. Keep Accurate Data

Make sure that you get all of your quotes in writing from your suppliers and ensure that you have some wiggle room. You don’t know what might happen over the production period so ensure your suppliers can deliver and have understood what you have asked for (see point #1).

5. Stay in Control

If you’re the one that’s going to be in charge of the budget, then get agreement from everyone in charge that you are in charge and that they need to support you to bring the show in on budget.

6. Keep it simple

I have seen all sorts of budgets and spreadsheets with clever stuff in them. I’ve seen plenty of spreadsheets that have fancy looking formulas, that are actually riddled with errors that cause endless headaches. Don't try to be too clever and never ever believe what the spreadsheet is telling you, unless you have checked it three times. Even then, check it again.

7. Be Realistic

There will be people on the production that think you can do it all by magic and that because you look at a laptop with the budget on, you can make money appear out of thin air. You are good, but not that good. You need to make sure that you are keeping the senior team aware of what the budget status and spend and in a way they can understand clearly. Oh, and prepare for budget meetings really well!

8. Get Support

If you are in control and clear and well prepared you will get the support of the production, which is fundamental to be able to do your job. You lose their respect if you’re a pushover. Be overly aggressive and you lose their support. Believe me I have done both.

9. Get through the process in Bite Sized Chunks

Just like revising for an exams, managing a budget should be dealt with section by section. Don't move on until you get the answers you need. Yes you have to multitask and have lots of pots boiling at once, but you have to be methodical. In this day and age any supplier that takes too long to get back to you with an answer is probably down to two factors: you haven't given them enough information to give you a quote or they do have enough information and cannot deliver what you need. Either way, get that quote or move on.

10. Be prepared to adjust

Finally whatever happens, the first budget you do won’t be the one you end up working with. There will be trims and changes and promises made by other people that you have no way of controlling. Be flexible, it is unrealistic to expect any show to have no challenges and if there it wasn’t challenging it would be a totally boring job to do, wouldn't it?

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Paul Goodliffe joined Aframe as Chief Commercial Officer in 2010 from Channel 5, after 20 years at the forefront of UK television production, at both independents and broadcasters.

Aframe Payplans - Why The Price is Right

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 11:35:00 -0000

A little explanation about our pricing

Aframe, the online video production service, no longer offer a range of plans, each with specific numbers of users, projects, storage and differing costs for add-ons like ingest, transcoding, tagging and more storage. Way too complex for us and our potential clients to think about, let alone remember.

To make things simpler, we’ve adopted a ‘per user per month’ model on three pay plans, each with increasing levels of functionality. Each user plan also has a set amount of free storage included with every user.

We continually improve the Aframe service and these new features will be added to the various plans. We believe this better reflects the way our customers use Aframe and provides a fairer price.

The Free One

Instead of the rather limiting 15 day trial, we now have the free for life, Personal account. This allows you to store showreels and any other videos with complete security, accessible from anywhere at any time, up to a total of 5GB. You can share these videos with anyone as much as you like and you won’t pay a bean.

The Professional Plan

The Professional plan allows you to start working with much higher quality footage. Not only is ingest easier, but you also get specific support when working with broadcast video. Sharing content is easy and recipients can download the high res if you let them. You can let others comment on the video in real time, making it a great review and approval tool.

The Business Plan

Our most popular offering is the Business plan. A significant step up from Professional, this offers the enhanced functionality of tagging and logging, allowing you to catalogue your clips at varying degrees of detail so you can what you’re looking for quickly and easily. Users also receive enhanced support and consultancy to improve user experience.

Business users also get to integrate with their Avid edit system via Aframe which can result in a seamless journey from camera through edit to broadcast. This feature is still in beta stage at the time of writing.

The Enterprise Plan

The Enterprise plan includes a significantly more functionality than the Business plan. For many the ability to integrate with our API will be especially attractive as it will allow developers to customise their own websites and applications using Aframe's unique software. This feature is still in beta stage at the time of writing.

Also included is the ability to tag live events and an embeddable player for web streaming. An additional 8 hours of consultancy is included to help with the advanced integration.

Working smarter and the Cloud: two sides of the same coin?

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 12:15:00 -0000

Head of Commercial Content at Aframe Claire Harvey recently attended Wig III, the third meeting of the Workflow Innovation Group, where TV production's best technical minds gather to discuss ways of improving the process of making TV.

The Workflow Innovation Group, within view of Bristol’s Clifton Bridge was an interesting and stimulating discussion. The day had two sessions: one to review the “cloud”, and the other to review how producers could work smarter to fit tighter budgets. Not, we discovered, mutually exclusive and potentially two sides of the same coin.

The “Cloud” is recognised within the Media Technology community as a solution to effective and efficient working practices for those working with digital content. However the word “Cloud” can bring negative connotations and surface concerns within the production community.

Would it be easier if the production community accepted that cloud was an inevitable part of progress and got on with the business of making the technologies work for them? Certainly, there was enthusiasm about the benefits the cloud could offer:

“It is a fantastic enabler to the way that we make things”
“Getting more people to work with the same material at the same time”
“Virtualising processes so people can use the features as needed”
“Make a set of possibilities available and then aiding people to get through it”

Cultural change is a key driver to technology adoption. There is concern about the unknown. This is not a new issue, although we are good at adopting new technology but bad at working out that we could do things differently. New working practices take time to learn, which is sometimes difficult to do in a pressured environment. Further new ways of working can change jobs which is a cause for concern.

Large and small companies have differing issues when it comes to technology change. Large companies may have more resources, including money, a ready network infrastructure and training budgets, to gear their workforce for new technology and ways of working. Conversely, it takes longer to review, approve and adopt new practices. For small companies, there may be less time for staff to develop knowledge and training but it may be faster to start using new technology.

Service Providers new into the space need to use recognisable language so as not to scare new users. An early adopter will iron out many issues. Aframe have developed a cloud based online video production toolset that delivers current television productions. An early adopter was BBC1’s The Manor Reborn, broadcast from November 2011. Through this process we learned a lot - about naming conventions for cards and rushes, about the management and organisation, and about interfacing with a Post Production House. And the good news is that it works.

Essentially, content companies need to juggle two key drivers in this current environment:

How can I be more efficient in making and storing my video?
How can I make money from my video?

With new outsourced solutions, companies weigh up two key factors:

Pain v control: If I manage everything myself, it will be difficult and expensive, but I am self-reliant
Efficiency v risk: Will I be more efficient using an inhouse systems, or outsourced systems?

Currently many producers do not know the exact cost of production at every stage and so it can be difficult in assessing the cost implications of new technology. Certainly, digital workflows are not just about storage. They include the tools that are necessary to manage the video once it is stored, including review and approval, metadata as well as document management. The potential of the cloud is to bring knowledge management to the next level and bring about services for collaboration.

Collaboration is a building block for any form of monetisation. Monetisation can only exist efficiently if content can travel freely between services and platforms. But as the meeting widely acknowledged, there are building blocks as pressing as collaboration to achieve this – and that is the need to be digitally fit and ready for the relevant purpose. The golden rules for this are:

Content should be digitised, server ready, and exist within a management system.
Content must be held with rich metadata and be effectively catalogued so it can be found easily.
Content must exist within a system that has a clear rights structure.
Content owners should be able to access their media easily and effectively to edit it.
Content owners should be ready to publish content.

Some content companies are engaging in a hybrid of managed services and internal facilities in order to manage trust and risk. There is little desire to standardise because it is too slow for the current environment. Therefore, Service Providers must be interoperable and work collaboratively with others, potentially using web services and APIs.

A new concept, “frenemy”, refers to the need for Service Providers to work together in this space to provide a joined up solution for a client. Companies working with multiple partners will be more attractive to clients who may have existing interests.

The future of Wig III could look to the network of “frenemies” for its next phase. The AV archive community’s European project, Presto, is a successful example of like minded companies coming together to solve a common problem. Their regular fora, wikis and training camps have been, and continue to be, an invaluable resource for large and small companies to come to terms with, and provide solutions to, key industry wide problems.

Screened - Every 2010 film screening in the UK on a map

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 11:33:00 -0000

The BFI have been collecting data on every single film screening that's happened in the UK since 2007, and I've taken that data and put it on a map in a small web application I'm calling Screened.

At Culture Hack Day earlier this year I met Katie Ellen, then at the UK Film Council (now the BFI) and she brought along this data as something that we, the hackers and coders who'd come along, could play with. It took most of the weekend just to wrangle the data into something that could be useable in a web page - we're talking around 5.4 million screenings per year in the UK, and gigabytes of data. That's not something that counts as "big data", but nor is it "small data" when you're looking to do something at a hack day.

She spent the rest of the year getting the data cleaned and moved over to a MySQL database, which she's made available to play with online (it's _very_ slow unfortunately) and as a CSV download, table by table.

Last week over coffee she mentioned where she'd got to and I'm currently in 'hack things together over the weekend' mode so I said I'd take a look and see what I could do with the data. I often do small spare-time hack projects - mobile apps, webapps, web toys, usually around culture, social issues, democracy - the kinds of things where I can apply some of the things I've learnt to something that could have a meaningful outcome.

Introducing Screened - an interactive map of UK film screening data

(please use a modern browser - Chrome, IE9, Safari. It's not great on a phone. It's okay on an iPad).

Screened is a mapping and visualisation app for 2010 UK film data (except Northern Ireland currently). The idea was to take the large amount of film data that the BFI have been collecting and display it on a set of interactive maps on the web and see what one could find out about trends in UK film.

Essentially it answers the question "which films were screened where in 2010?"

Here's some of the stuff it does:

View a map of all screenings of all films that were publicly shown in the UK in 2010

Number of screenings: Cyan: 1-2 , Green: 10-20, Yellow: 5,000, Orange: 10,000, Red: 40,000, Magenta: 100,000.

I started with a k-means clustering display (see below), but eventually realised that what you'd want is a "heatmap" of film hotspots across the map. With helpful suggestions from Marcus Baker and David MacIver (the resident maths genii at Aframe) I managed to get it to be responsive and really quite fun to play around with.

View a map of all UK film venues that screened something in 2010

Scale of each circle indicates number of venues located near one-another.

This isn't every location that's ever shown a film (which is the data I did start with - one for the future) - instead I pulled out just the 2011 (that's the number of venues, not the near) venues that showed a film in 2010 and put them on a k-means clustering map. This means you can see a list of venues for a town with one click. Each green circle essentially collects together all venues that are geographically close so that it's easy to find them. Zooming in gives you more detail so you can distinguish between venues. (The green is incidental in this display).

View a map of specialised film screenings

"Specialised" is a term that needs some clarification - essentially it's underground, independent, unusual, art, classic, non-mainstream film and it's the kind of film that the BFI have a remit to support. I'm hoping this could be a useful visualisation for helping make decisions about where to support these kinds of film activities in any given year.

View a map of screenings for a particular film

One thing that was relatively easy to produce was a map of where a film was screened over the year. It's interesting to search for different types of films and see where in the UK that kind of film appeals. This could be very useful for festivals organisers, cinema owners, gallery curators and so on to in effect do some basic market research about which kinds of films are received well where, and where perhaps there are gaps in the market that could be served better. There's lots more that I could do here, but this is just a quick beta.

Zoom into the detail

"Specialised" film is shown in green, all other links are in blue.

You can get interesting ranked stats on film showings on a given area, see lists of venues, show individual films - I'm still coming up with ideas for how to drill down into the data that's most of interest.

Using the maps you can answer these questions:

"What were the top ten films that were screened in my local cinema?"
"Which parts of the UK are relatively under-served by for film screenings?"
"Which films are popular in Coventry?"
"Which venues in a town showed film in 2010?"
"Where are there hotspots of specialised film screenings?"
"Which areas of the UK are relatively under-served for specialised film?"

And a lot more...

What's next?

Cross-browser support

I'm not sure it's going to work in older browsers - I'll add something that tells you if it doesn't.

More years

The data I've based this on is just 2010. I'm hoping to extend it to every year that the BFI have data for.

An API?

I had to convert the CSV files that the BFI supplied into something that was useable and responsive - so I flipped to Mongo. It would seem like a reasonable idea to get that data onto a server that the BFI have some control over and then design a simple API for querying it. If you know what you're doing you can look under the hood - I'm making requests to a couple of 'API' type routes based on a bounding box and returning GeoJSON. I'm thinking - how about the BFI have a JSONP API that does this so that others can play with the data. I'll have a word and see if they're interested.

More maps

There are a bunch of ideas that I've had for maps. I'll make them when I have a minute.

A slider for time

I'm thinking some kind of slider at the top of each map that lets you show how the data changes over time. So for a film you could see where its first release is and then where it then goes around the country. Could be very interesting.

Other art forms?

A few people have suggested that this approach could be taken for other art forms - theatre, dance, music... if you've got a data-set that could do with this treatment drop me a line.

URLs for films and venues

At the moment it's all very javascript-heavy. I'll add Backbone.js and give these things URLs so that you can link directly to them.

The tools I used for the job

As ever, this kind of quick mashup is only possible thanks to the work of others who release open source software. Here's a bunch of stuff you should look at should you want to attempt anything similar:

Padrino - This is a great, "Rails-lite" web framework for building apps and sites. I've found that I'm using it for more or less all of my spare time hack projects, and in fact we're using it now at Aframe for many of our web-based apps.
HAML - For generating page layouts this is by far the easiest to read and debug.
Compass - A rather wonderful collection of CSS utilities and a compiler that enables you to write maintainable stylesheets that work cross-browser.
Twitter Bootstrap - Twitter have released a front-end web framework that's great for knocking something together that looks pretty and should generally work in most browsers and on many devices. iPad support is _kind_ of there, but it's not perfect. I'll be working on that.
HTML5 Boilerplate - a collection of best practices for modern web development using HTML5.
JQuery - Once your data has hit the browser, JQuery takes care a lot of the interactive elements.
Polymaps - The core of the app is the mapping display. Polymaps is designed to take a large data-set and display it incrementally on a map. As opposed to Google Maps which is designed to show an entire dataset at once. For the size of data we're talking that would make for slow requests and unresponsiveness. Additionally, the map can display extra detail at increasing zoom levels. This was essential and is also something missing from Google Maps. So much thanks to the inspiring people at Stamen who do wonderful mapping and visualisation work.
MongoDB - This is where I store all of the data for app. It's semi-relational, but also NoSQL, so you can do relational queries as well as flattening out views of data using map/reduce.
Rack/cache - I am caching each HTTP response for each call for "give me the data for everything within this bounding box" and stuffing it into...
Memcached - a very fast memory-based cache available for free on Heroku.
Varnish - HTTP-caching as much as possible for responsiveness. Unfortunately it seems that if you add Google Analytics it disables Varnish. I'm working on a fix.

For hosting, it's Heroku, with data stored with MongoHQ.

Huge thanks to Katie Ellen for giving me access to the data and for all the work getting it published. If you'd like a copy of the data yourself email her at Katie.ellen@bfi.org.uk

Got an idea?

If you've got an idea for what I could add to the app or how it could be improved, please leave a comment or tweet me: @stef

Stef Lewandowski is co-founder of Aframe. Day-to-day he's involved in software development, design and has the rather grand title of "Chief Innovation Officer".

Aframe reception - a customer review

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 11:32:00 -0000

The following is unashamedly lifted (with permission of course) from a recent newsletter the Production Manager's Association (PMA) sends out to it's many production manager members. It's written by Peter Laskie, a production manager at CPL Productions, one of Aframe's customers.

"On Wednesday 14th September I attended the Aframe and PMA joint event which was an evening reception and demonstration hosted by the PMA and sponsor Aframe, held a conveniently short walk from my current production office.

The venue was The Future Gallery at 5 Great Newport Street WC2 situated, even more conveniently for Aframe, next door to their office at number 4. This short walk from the office was one that I and other members of my production team had become very familiar with over the previous weeks, more of that in a moment.

Inside the white, up lit gallery laptop computers were set on plinths ready for the demonstration. There was a big screen at one end of the room and, I noticed, a free bar serving beers and wine at the other. And waitresses walking round offering challenging canapés. I accepted a small salmon and cream cheese canapé on a circular pastry base. The base looked firm but as I picked it up from the safety of the tray it turned out to be soft and not supportive. The canapé began to tilt at an alarming angle. It was a race to get the base and topping to my mouth before it could fall down my front, there was no question of biting into it. The whole lot had to get into my mouth in one go or not at all.

I’m not going to attempt to explain here everything that Aframe can offer, which will vary depending on your production requirements, but they do offer a service that could be the answer to your tapeless file based woes. Have a look at their website aframe.com I am currently using their services on a pilot for the BBC. We have been shooting tapeless in London and each morning the previous days rushes, on Compact Flash cards, were delivered to Aframe for ingestion and backing up. So all my media wrangling, backup and storage concerns were dealt with in one go.

Shortly after lunchtime each day the rushes were available on the Aframe website for viewing, tagging, commenting on and organising into preferred take collections. Access for viewing and commenting can be shared with anyone we chose to give a login to.

Some of the team took particular delight in scanning in the release forms and attaching them to the relevant clips for future reference. The selected rushes were then transferred directly from Aframe to our post production house, Uncle, for the edits. Before the demonstration started there was time for another canapé. This time it was some tasty looking Mediterranean mixture in an open pastry shell, “Safer than the last one”, I commented to the waitress and realised from the way she was looking at my beard that I hadn’t been entirely successful with the first canapé. Anyway the “pastry shell” for this one turned out to be cabbage leaves.

Before David Peto, Aframe CEO and Co-Founder presented the demonstration he introduced the members of the Aframe team including Simon Gannon, Kerry Freeman, Claire Harvey, Tim Burton and Rory McVicar who were helping with the demo. David explained he had been accused in the past of speaking too quickly at such events. To keep his presentation delivery at a comprehendible speed and avoid people drifting off to the bar during the demo (cue “go to the bar” appearing on the screen behind him, thanks Tim/Rory), Paul Goodliffe, Aframe CCO was there to act as a human metronome and keep David’s tempo in check.

The well-paced presentation was a comprehensive illustration of Aframe’s capabilities in a language that we all could understand followed by a Q&A session. If you missed it, and a lot of you did, I encourage you to find out for yourself what Aframe can offer your production. I also hear there may be another presentation or workshop in the offing.

My thanks to Aframe for being very easy to work with, for the evening and of course, for the canapés."

Vote for us in the Europas

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 10:31:00 -0000

The Europas are the premier European Awards for early stage Internet and Mobile technology startups. Entries are shortlisted by an Advisory Board and then the winners are decided by an industry vote. The Europas are chaired by Mike Butcher, Editor of TechCrunch Europe.

Aframe is in the Best Business or Enterprise Startup category, but being shortlisted in itself for a business only launched to the world 11 months ago is an amazing achievement. But Aframe is ambitious and being shortlisted isn't enough. WE WANT TO WIN THIS THING!

So please vote for us, get your friends and family to vote for us, then tell everyone else you voted for us and how great it made you feel!

Aframe Wins Prestigious 2011 Bully Award

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 10:30:00 -0000

Aframe was announced today as a Young Bull winner of the 2011 Bully Award, honouring Europe’s leading technology, media and telecommunications (TMT) companies presented by White Bull Summits, champions of the European innovation ecosystem.

A total of 60 European companies were named as finalists for the 2011 Bully Award, and the deserving winners were selected from a pool of entries that included hundreds of nominated European TMT companies. Young Bulls are defined as firms that seek or have received Series A financing, so are early stage companies.

"The Bully Award winners were selected for innovation and values of excellence in the TMT sector. They have been recognized as a leader in their field, with a bright business proposition and meaningful market strategies, driven by a rich understanding of customer needs and technological solutions,” stated Farley Duvall, Founder and Chairman of White Bull Summits.

“We’re honoured to be named a 2011 Bully Award winner, and to be recognized as one of the leading TMT companies in Europe,” stated David Peto, CEO Aframe. “Video production is a tough area to be innovative in this day and age so it’s testament to our entire team and the incredible hard work they put in every day. It's fantastic to be named a winner for this prestigious award, and we accept and share it with the entire company and our investors.”

How Aframe is Boosting the Classical Music Market

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 10:29:00 -0000

Aframe have been awarded a prestigious contract from NESTA, The Arts Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to work with prominent classical music venues to explore ways of improving audience numbers.

Aframe will partner with online distribution service Videojuicer and respected North East venue the Sage Gateshead to examine how digital technology can increase the size and expand the reach of audiences for classical music. Like many arts venues across the UK, the Sage Gateshead is keen to explore ways of finding audience growth in the face of tough economic challenges.

The project will connect with traditionally hard to reach groups, including those in rural areas, new mums, the elderly, young people and other lapsed audience groups that previously would not have had access to live performances. Using the latest digital video production workflow technology, Aframe will provide the backbone to enable performances at the Sage, Manchester Camerata and the Aurora Orchestra to be simultaneously broadcast, aka ‘simulcast’, at the Berwick Maltings, Alnwick Playhouse and Durham Gala. The concerts will then be available as a download.

The grant was one of only eight successful bids submitted to a panel of the Arts funding bodies, which control the £½m fund. Of the original 495 bids, just 18 were shortlisted and interviewed before the final eight projects were awarded.

Head of Commercial Content, Claire Harvey commented:
“This is a really proud moment in our [albeit short] history. Aframe is a natural conduit for just this type of project and we can’t wait to start adding value to the arts community.”

Subclipping just got better

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 10:28:00 -0000

Our subclipping feature has been really useful for many customers. Whether it's been for instant rough cuts during a live sportscast for Giant or replicating the paper edit process for CPL.Well now the feature just got even better.

If you need to make several subclips from an original clip, you can now choose to add them to the end of the original clip. That way, you can make a sequence of clips as you go, whilst being able to see the original and review your new cuts. Or you can select to start work with the new subclip right away.

Connect documents with video moments

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 10:27:00 -0000

Aframe has video and Aframe has documents. Now you can mix your Aframe video with your Aframe documents!

You can already upload any file that helps you organise the shoot, pre-production planning or any other aspect of your project using Aframe's document facility. Call sheets, scripts, release forms and prop lists are all then handily stored in the documents section of your Aframe project. You can now display links to these documents at specific moments on the video, making a rather useful mix of your documents and your video clips.

A good example of this feature in use is if you want to highlight a release form the moment a member of the public appears on screen in your clips. They appear as moments below the video, just like logs, tags and comments.

Which kind of means we've invented 3D metadata! No?

Improved ways to share video clips

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 10:26:00 -0000

Now when you want to share a clip or clips with people outside your immediate Aframe team, you get a bunch of new options. Firstly, as well as letting other people view your clips, you can also choose to allow other people to download the original, a h264 or a proxy as well as your web stream version.

Next, decide how you'd like to share it. You can paste a link to the video into an instant message, email or a website to share it with the world. Alternatively, you can use the system to email the footage to anyone you like.

When the link is clicked, viewers can choose to download a version (if you let them). You can also see whenever anyone on the team shares anything and also see when recipients have watched and downloaded the clips.

The Smarta way to a free Aframe account

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 10:24:00 -0000

Aframe have been nominated as a top UK start up in the Smarta 100. This annual celebration of the most resourceful, original, exciting and disruptive small businesses in the UK is pretty influential within the start up community. Previous winners include Huddle, who now boast that “75% of the Fortune 500” trust them.

It’s a nice way to end the week, especially after we were shortlisted for a Bully too!

To be in with a chance of winning the top prize, we have to win the vote. Unlike X Factor, it won’t cost you a penny. Here is the direct link to our voting page: http://www.smarta.com/smarta100/2011-winners/aframe

It only takes 30 seconds and it will mean the world to us if we get in the top places. As a mark of our gratitude, we’ll give away a lifetime 3 user Aframe account to everyone who tells us they’ve voted via Twitter, email or Facebook. Can’t say fairer than that can we??

Video back up you can rely on

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 10:23:00 -0000

"What in google's name is that?" you may be asking yourself. This, we would respond, is why Aframe stays running when other systems go down.

This is a picture of our back up generators. They kick into life the moment there is a loss of power to our data centre. So even if a force majeure attempts to wreak havoc on the physical world, you can still keep working in the virtual one!

We love a bit of Bully

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 10:22:00 -0000

Aframe is among 60 finalists shortlisted for a 2011 Bully Award, which honours top European technology, media and telecommunications start ups.

Organisers White Bull offer 'a community that brings together the best and the brightest of Europe’s top technology and media leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, investors, and visionaries'.

The 30 winners will be announced at the Pathways to Exit Summit in Barcelona, 3-5 October 2011.

Tapeless is tough, say TV industry

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 10:21:00 -0000

So no surprises in Broadcast’s Technology Survey: file-based workflow is the television industry’s biggest single technological worry.

Nearly half of respondents pinpointed that a world without tape, largely driven by a fall in supply of tapes following the Japanese Tsunami, as the biggest technological challenge for the year ahead. Delving a little deeper, specific worries include storage and archiving, codecs and metadata.

Industry experts are now very much aware that tapeless costs money and you need to think carefully before you pick a basket in which to place all your eggs. The cost and logistics involved in managing, tagging, storing and archiving huge reams of data is proving a challenge for all parts of the industry. For producers and facilities in particular the challenge for the year ahead will be to make their investments in tapeless workflow pay.

Darlow Smithson’s Director of Operations highlights the extra costs that are now being factored into each shoot to cover the cost of data wranglers and workflow consultants.

“It’s an expensive process at the moment. While the hardware is cheap, the management and storage of material is not.”

Of course Aframe sees these problems as opportunities. CEO David Peto explained how his team regularly dries the brows of stressed executives at some of the largest production companies in the industry.
“We’re not just talking about how Aframe might help them, we’re advising on the whole of the tapeless process. From finding the right camera to the choosing an edit platform, we’re always happy to help – even if that means the client does not go with Aframe in the end”.

Finding new approaches to metadata

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 10:20:00 -0000

Thanks to Claire Harvey, Aframe's Head of Archive for this post.

There is much discussion about the value of metadata. When it comes down to it, many companies which deal in AV content, whether they are producers, broadcasters or archives, find it difficult to justify the cost of creating it. The theoretical benefits of creating metadata are easy to understand: it helps us to find, view and publish our content. However, many AV custodians don’t see the value coming back, either through process efficiencies or income.

Creating metadata is buying the train pass that can get you to work. Without it, there is little chance of your content earning you any money. You know you have to do it, but it would be a lot more fun to spend that money on a shiny new app for the website.

Metadata is a catch all term for a whole variety of digital information that can be used to describe and organise AV content. It might be a title, or the name of associated media. It might be descriptive metadata - such as a contextual description, traditional logs, or keyword tags associated to a specific timecode. Technical metadata includes format, bit rate, aspect ratio and so on. Dublin Core categorise it into 15 different types, many of which can extend into hundreds or thousands of words.

Metadata is the digital word for cataloguing - which has of course gone on for hundreds of years without question. So why is there suddenly a problem?
One problem is that there is suddenly a whole lot more media to catalogue. Broadcast archives are struggling to handle ten times the volume of media that they had even five years ago.

The volume of metadata is growing for a variety of reasons, particularly the need to effectively navigate digital media. Usually, media is catalogued on an “asset level” - which means it is possible to search and retrieve a whole asset - whether it is a clip, a programme or a film. There is now the desire to be able to search within that media - for when a brand is mentioned, or to find a particular shot in a stack of rushes. Timecode based metadata is necessarily rich. How many words could you use to effectively describe a still image? Multiply that by multiples of a moving image and you can understand the problem.

All of this costs money and takes time. We need new solutions to process more media, faster and cheaper than before. And we need a bigger revenue stream to support the work. There are signs that all of this is possible.

The in-house route is the classic way of tackling metadata. Archives employ people to create and manage their metadata. BBC’s Newsnight famously took eight hours to catalogue a single hour of moving image media. In France, Ina employed up to 40 staff devoted to cataloguing. This type of approach is still popular, although the funds to support it are dwindling. Archives will always retain a number of staff dedicated to metadata. These staff will not only provide cataloguing services, but manage the overall process for their organisation in terms of standards, naming conventions, ontologies, taxonomies and integrating metadata that might be created by outside providers.

Outsourced providers are emerging and becoming increasingly popular. This change is supported because inhouse cataloguing databases have often been bypassed in favour of Digital Asset Management Systems which can accept metadata in a wider number of formats and types. Even with these systems, there remains an issue around integrating out of house metadata with inhouse systems and standards. As unstructured datasets and the semantic web become increasingly popular this will be a decreasing issue. Our very own Aframe can turn around an hour of footage faster than real time using bespoke standards. SERCO’s prisoners have begun offering their services, Prime Focus has teams in India.

Artificial Intelligence is used in a variety of solutions - Autonomy being the most complete service provider, and speech to text is used in some genres.
Crowdsourcing is currently sexy and many archives are using it as a tool in their armory. The Photographer’s collective, Magnum, have recently released their archive for crowdsourcing metadata. Todd Carter, the co-founder and Chief Executive of Tagasauris writes: "People who would balk at doing this for giants like Getty or Corbis would be happy to help this particular collective of photographers and preserve part of photography’s cultural heritage." The downside of crowdsourcing is the level of QC needed to verify the tags collected. The Dutch National Archive and Flick reported a project in 2009 which created just 3% of usable metadata from crowdsourcing.

There are process improvements that will help with the cost of metadating. The most sensible option is to catalogue when the material is shot - log it at source, and then keep the tags through into the Archive. The least sensible option is cataloguing into an Excel spreadsheet that has to be done multiple times through the production process and then again as it hits the archive. Somewhere in between, Production Teams are being actively encouraged to participate to some degree in the cataloguing process. This might include entering tags, rights information and asset level descriptors.
Technology improvements will help with repurposing metadata - an open and unstructured database being the nirvana, and a closed structured database the least effective.

And once all this is done? Where’s the promised pot of gold at the end of the metadating rainbow? Whilst the market for content sales is relatively small, growth is steady. Screen Digest reported that the global trade in archive content generated €430m in revenue in 2009 with total revenue growing at a CAGR of nearly 8% over the past five years - not bad in times of financial impecunity.

The signs are that the AV content market is on the crest of a wave. As rights are tackled at a territory level, this will open up the AV market to new business models not currently seen or imagined. And that will be the focus of my next blog post.

Know when your video has been watched

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 10:19:00 -0000

We've just added a nice little video analytics feature. When you share clips, you can now see whether the person watched the video, how many times they’ve watched it and for how long. Something like this:

Simon Gannon shared 1 clip with a total running time of 00:00:13 on 29 Jul @ 14:54. It was viewed 2 times, for 92 and 249 seconds respectively.

It’s a bit Big Brother we know, but really useful if you’re waiting for urgent feedback and want to see when someone's seen your clip (just don't mention that you know they've watched it...).

Adding footage to Aframe is easy as FTP

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 10:18:00 -0000

We’ve just introduced the ability to upload your content to us via FTP. File Transfer Protocol is a really fast and efficient way of transferring bulk data over the internet and works really well for anyone using Aframe.

We’ve included full instructions on how to get started within the Add footage section. Any files you put in the ingest folder are automatically processed and added to your footage on that specific project on Aframe. Works really well for downloading your content too.

Novacut - a contender for a new Linux video editor

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 10:17:00 -0000

Aframe have recently backed (financially-backed rather than just moral support) an open source project, Novacut, who are building a collaborative pro video editor using open source technology.

The Novacut project is a good example of crowd funding. This is a really interesting way of raising finance for a project by asking lots of other people to contribute a little. This particular crowd fund was organised through Kickstarter, one of the largest funding platforms for creative projects in music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields. Crowd funding lends itself really well to projects that are experimental and little bit different, where traditional models wouldn’t be commercially viable.

For Aframe, helping to fund open source software projects is an important part of our company ethos. Our developers have a rich history of open source projects and they regularly author, contribute to and use a fair amount of openly sourced tools to look after and improve Aframe, using the Linux, Apache, Passenger and Ruby platforms.

As Marcus Baker, one of our senior developers put it, “we’re totally immersed in open source coding and really like it when we can get involved in supporting similar projects in the video field”.

Part of the open source philosophy is to give back when you can, usually by contributing code to other projects, which our dev team regularly do. Check out the Open Source Initiative for more details.

Novacut is especially interesting to us at Aframe as it looks into creating a professional-level video editor on Linux, where fans and artists can collaborate and share. They are keen to help filmmakers using HDSLR cameras working on shoe string budgets.

Great idea and exactly the kind of venture we like supporting. Good luck guys!

Oh no! Duplicate file names. Oh no! Duplicate file names.

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 10:16:00 -0000

One neat new feature those clever Aframers have just developed is a way of handling files from multiple cameras that all have the same file name. This can happen if the camera crew don’t name each camera before shooting begins. Normally, the problem could only be solved by eyeballing the footage and renaming it.

If two people both started shooting on a XF305 (though other cameras are available of course), the first file they would produce might be called something like RE000101.MXF. This presents the crew with immense (and rather annoying) problems when trying to organise the footage. Help is at hand though.

Aframe now automatically appends a unique 8 character code to the end of any duplicated file names, so the 2nd one would be called RE000101-abcd1234 or whatever, which keeps it all nice and unique. All the file names are also editable once it’s in Aframe too.

This all happens without user intervention, which keeps your workflow streamlined and life that much easier.

The New Age of Rights

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 10:14:00 -0000

Thanks to Claire Harvey, Aframe's Head of Archive for this post.

The eG8 Forum in Paris (24-25 May 2011) pulled in the glitterati of the Internet World. Eric Schmidt, Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Lessig, amongst others, debated the future of our networked society and passed on their observations to the ensuing G8 meeting. Quite a coup.

The internet is threatening the hegemony of global governments. Twitter has fanned the flames of revolution in the Middle East, and has brought privacy laws in the UK to their knees. Facebook, Skype, YouTube, Spotify (and there are many more) are game changers, significantly reshaping how we live and work.

How should the powerful nations of the G8 respond? At the eG8, Sarkozy applauded the game changers, and then asked them to behave responsibly. The shadow of regulation loomed as Speaker after Speaker challenged Governments at national and international level not to regulate, because to regulate would obstruct innovation and the next generation of game changers.

Lawrence Lessig from Creative Commons, in an extraordinary speech, asked that Governments “embrace open and free access”. The internet game changers, he suggested, are outsiders who have disrupted established industry players. He urged Governments not to bow to the power of the existing industry lobby, and restrict the potential of disruptive technologies.

Global consulting firm, MacKinsey, published research during the eG8 suggesting that for every one job lost through efficiencies created by the Internet, 2.6 jobs were created to support new revenue streams. That kind of statistic is particularly attractive in these dark days of recession and debt. Do these kinds of figures make it worthwhile to support disruptive technologies to the potential detriment of existing companies?

Copyright is a key area in this debate and particularly relevant to AV archives. As we know, legally licensing audiovisual content is a pain. Most archives are drowning in complicated legal documents that make it difficult to sell their content, that block the market and perversely, stimulate content piracy.

The Hargreaves Report in the UK (18 May 2011) acknowledged: “Could it be true that laws designed more than three centuries ago with the express purpose of creating economic incentives for innovation by protecting creators’ rights are today obstructing innovation and economic growth? The short answer is: Yes.”

The Report suggested a raft of measures designed to ease the process of licensing content, urging current media companies to change to embrace these measures. Critics have argued that the Report favours the development of potential disruptive technology ventures, such as the future Spotifys, YouTubes and others, over current practices within existing media companies of licensing and monetizing content.

In the same week, the EU Commission proposed new legislation that would provide lawful, cross-border online access to orphan works. This has the potential to liberate significant archives across Europe for access and monetisation.

The impact of these three events on AV archives could be profound. Combined, they challenge the existing business models of most AV archives. But, they could also open up the landscape to a raft of new business models. And who are best placed to take advantage of this? None other than AudioVisual archives.

Of the 38 million hours of AV archive content globally, only 1% of the content is monetised (Screen Digest 2010). To license a 10 second clip of archive content, there are up to 100 different prices that could be paid - and that’s for rights-ready content that is easy to use. Licensing premium content with third party rights? Forget it. Whilst we shouldn’t roll over to give away content for free, we need to make it easier to sell our content, and so, we have to support the attempts to free up our ability to make our archive content accessible, and to create a revenue stream from it.

Will that improvement come with regulations such as the HADOPI rule in France, and the recent Google ruling in Germany? HADOPI is among the most draconian in the world, including a “three strikes” law that would have internet service providers deny online access to repeat offenders.

As Sarkozy said at the eG8: “Each of you should be able to be heard because each of you undertake creative work. It is under this copyright law for creative work that you have been able to found companies that have become empires. These algorithms that constitute your power, this continual innovation that constitutes your strength, this technology that is changing the world, are your property and nobody can contest that. Each of you, each of us, can therefore understand that writers, directors or actors can have the same rights."

In Germany meanwhile, a Hamburg court ruled in 2010 that YouTube should pay compensation after users uploaded several videos of Sarah Brightman. Arnd Haller, director of legal affairs at Google Germany, said the court ruling disregards the current e-commerce directive of the European Union: “This decision results in a substantial legal uncertainty for all providers of video platforms, opinion forums, social communities, blogs and many other internet services in Germany.”

The good and the bad news is that Pandora’s Box has been opened and it seems that the world of content is pitched against the ever-developing world of tech - which feels rather old fashioned in our modern converged society. Surely we should be working together to develop new and easy-to-use innovative copyright and pricing structures that enable us to generate new revenue streams? The archive world is ideally placed to bridge these worlds. It sits neatly across tech innovation, and cultural and creative expression. The Europeana project is an expression of this, and everyday archives push the boundaries of what can be achieved in how technology can create innovation in content access, use and monetisation. In the UK, the Hargreaves Report creates an environment in which this work can flourish. We must continue to push these boundaries to deliver practical solutions for content licensing globally that lets us innovate, grow and prosper.

Keeping Aframe Ticking Over

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 10:15:00 -0000

Our very own System Administrator (aka Computer Lord) Jon Cowie will tonight be talking about the pivotal role he plays in building and operating Aframe, including the design decisions that went into the building process.

You can hear from the great man himself at the London Devops event in Camden from 6.30pm.

Order Clips by Timecode

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 10:13:00 -0000

The list of ways you can sort the order in which clips has improved again. As well as sorting by capture time, ingest time, camera serial, description, title and not forgetting ‘by hand’, you can now sort clips by their Timecode - earlier to later or vice versa. Which we think will be very useful. What do you think?

Editable Summaries on Collections

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 10:12:00 -0000

To make a Collection of clips more meaningful to other team members, you can now add a short summary. To do this, you can add it when you create the collection or if the collection’s already been created, open the collection and type it into the text box at the top. Never again will you have to explain what you were thinking when creating an obscure, random sets of clips!

Improved Search = Improved Results

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 10:11:00 -0000

We’re constantly enhancing the way Aframe’s search engine performs to make it into an even more useful tool for Aframe users. The latest upgrades have really made the search feature more powerful.

Relevant Results
Firstly, search results are sorted by relevance as a default. This means that whilst you may have lots of clips returned from a search, the ones at the top are likely to be the most relevant based on what you’re searching for. For example, a search for “Tom Jerry” will return a whole heap of results, but the ones at the top will be those with Tom AND Jerry, followed by clips with Tom or Jerry.

Refining Search Even Further
Building on the Relevant Results feature, search terms can now use the “&” to return results exclusively featuring both terms. For example, searching for “Tom & Jerry” provides results that are confined to only those featuring Tom and Jerry together. This subtle (but nonetheless important) improvement potentially changes the way users with lots of media on Aframe can find the precise clip they want.

Searching by Clip Titles and Collections
To refine your search, you can now search by just the clip title. For example, to search for clips containing the word Tom, type “Title: Tom”. Similarly, if you had collections featuring the word Tom, you could search only collections with the search term “Collection: Tom”.

Look out for more improvements in search here soon. Let me know if you’d like to be kept updated on upgrades as they happen.

Cloud Security's Bright Future

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 10:10:00 -0000

Rory Cellan-Jones , BBC’s Technology correspondent, recently highlighted the flaws in open wireless networks when using cloud based technology. Aside from ensuring you only use encrypted networks (not always possible or an option when you’re on the move), the main way you can protect yourself is by looking out for secure websites,whose URLs are prefixed with HTTPS rather than HTTP.

HTTP is unsecured and is subject to man-in-the-middle and eavesdropping attacks, which can let attackers gain access to website accounts and sensitive information. Aframe always uses HTTPS as it is designed to withstand such attacks and is considered much more secure.

So you can be sure that not only is your data safe on Aframe, even people eavesdropping on your internet session will be unable to see your latest production. We can’t stop them looking over your shoulder though. Yet.

Transcode AVC-Intra 100 with Aframe

Wed, 25 May 2011 10:09:00 -0000

Aframe can now transcode AVC-Intra media allowing you to add this format at one of our ingest points.

The AVC-Intra codec used in a number of Panasonic's high definition broadcast products, including their P2 card equipped broadcast cameras.

So if you're working with this format and need to get a file to someone for approval, just upload it to Aframe and you can send it to someone so they can view it in their web browser or on their mobile device.

Rough cut your clips

Wed, 25 May 2011 10:08:00 -0000

In response to several customer requests, you can now create rough cuts on clips within your Aframe project. Whilst watching the clip in review mode, you can adjust the edit in and out points of any clip and then save it as a new clip. The original remains untarnished, so if you make a mistake or want to expand the cut later on, you still can.

Once you’re happy with your cuts, gather them all up in a collection to download, email or carry on subclipping. If you had the footage tagged originally, the tags are carried through to the subclipped stage, so searching is still really easy.

As you access Aframe remotely over the internet, you can start subclipping direct from the set, just like our friends at BAMMA recently did. As with all Aframe features, it’s really easy to use, so give it a go and tell us what you think.

Mixed Martial Arts; it's just not cricket

Wed, 25 May 2011 10:06:00 -0000

So, that was BAMMA; tough, exciting and very, very impressive.

Aframe was at BAMMA 6 (BAMMA is the British Association of Mixed Martial Arts) to improve the accessibility and ‘searchability’ of their video footage by providing live tagging and the ability to create highlights packages on-the-fly. For more on how we did it, see the recent blog post. In short, Aframe made the production much easier, quicker and a lot more efficient than BAMMAs 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5!

Inside a packed Wembley Arena, the scene was quite unlike any sporting event I'd ever attended. Dark, sweaty and with the very real sense things were about to kick off. Surrounded by 10,000 fans baying for blood, their focus on the small octagonal cage, there is something positively gladiatorial about MMA (Mixed Martial Arts). The Test Match at Lord’s, this certainly was not.

MMA is one of the fastest growing sports in the UK and successful protagonists can look forward to lucrative contracts in the Ultimate Fighting Championships in the US. Fights can be won by knockout, technical knockout (when the referee intervenes to stop the fight), or when an opponent submits. Submission can be due to strikes, a joint lock or a choke. Competitors use a variety of fighting techniques and skills, from a mixture of other combat sports including Wrestling, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Judo, Karate, Muay Thai and Boxing.

BAMMA 6 featured 16 fights of varying degrees of duration. Some lasted the full 15 minutes (3 rounds of 5 minutes each), some didn’t make it past 60 seconds. The finale to BAMMA 6 was the middleweight title fight between the UK’s Tom ‘Kong’ Watson and Brazil’s Murilo ‘Ninja’ Rua. Whilst the ‘Ninja’ resisted a walk-on involving throwing stars and a black face mask, ‘Kong’ used his moniker to much greater effect. He appeared wearing a gorilla mask and dancing to Chaka Demus & Pliers’ Twist and Shout, I guess to lull his opponent into a sense of ‘90s reggae-pop’ security, before ripping it off to reveal his ‘fight face’.

Whether it was pure showmanship or a genuine attempt to throw Ninja off his guard, it worked. Watson pummelled Rua over three rounds before it was eventually stopped by the referee. The 10,000 fans and a smattering of celebs (Cuba Gooding Jr, Goldie and the slow one out of the Inbetweeners) erupted.

A fantastic end to a very successful night for BAMMA and Aframe.

BAMMA 6 benefits from Aframe live footage logging

Tue, 24 May 2011 10:04:00 -0000

London-based Giant Film and TV became the first company to use Aframe’s live footage logging application on a sports production when it rolled out the web-based technology on coverage of BAMMA 6 on Saturday night, writes UK Correspondent, Will Strauss. For the sixth tournament in the mixed martial arts (MMA) franchise, the independent producer used Aframe to help quicken turnaround of the broadcast and online highlights packages that are made available around the world after live transmission of the fights. Footage of the event was tagged as it happened, allowing international journalists, sponsors and broadcast editors covering the event to immediately edit their own story or package by searching for action by text keyword.

Rough cuts were also completed within Aframe itself and then sent to the US for broadcasters to air on the night of the tournament. In previous years, with footage logging done after the event, US broadcasters had waited several days for highlights to show while journalists and website publishers had to request DVD copies.

BAMMA executive producer David Green, who is also the chief executive of Giant Film and TV, said: “Aframe gave us a fantastic opportunity to deliver our content in an incredibly fast, easy and accessible way. It’s not only revolutionary for the MMA industry but for any sport that thrives on live broadcasting and the need to deliver highlights to the plethora of media outlets around the Globe.”

How it worked:

> A live feed of BAMMA 6 was taken from an OB truck in London and fed into the cloud-based Aframe platform via Streamtank.

> As soon as footage appeared on the system, Aframe’s logging team in Sunderland added keywords to precise moments in the timecode using terminology and tags provided in advance by Giant.

> A member of the Giant production team back in London monitored the tagging via Aframe to ensure accuracy.

> As soon as the tagging had started, a BAMMA production team member used Aframe to rough cut a highlights package using the logged metadata.

> URL links to full resolution (Avid and Final Cut compatible) video files were then emailed to broadcasters to download and broadcast.

> At the same time, journalists and other online publishers logged into Aframe and cut their own ‘best of’ packages – based on their own individual requirements – before transferring them to their own websites.

David Peto, the chief executive of Aframe, said: “Suddenly BAMMA went from dealing with desperate DVD requests to allowing everyone to grab what they wanted, at the exact moment they wanted it, and then put it on their website. As far as I can see there is no else in the world that has ever done this before.”

Peto went on to suggest that the success of BAMMA could open up the door for other live events to do something similar. “As long as there is some kind of capture device, which Aframe can pick up a feed from, we can have it tagged live,” he said. “We’re not trying to do OB trucks out of business but it opens up a whole world of fun stuff around sports events and franchises. It could work equally well on factual or reality shows too.”

He acknowledged that even before the event had taken place he had received an approach from a US sports producer who is interested in making use of live footage logging.

This article originally appeared on Sports Video Group Europe

Aframe will be in BAMMA's corner

Tue, 17 May 2011 10:03:00 -0000

Exciting morning today! We've been up on the roof of Lilywhites in the heart of London for the BAMMA (British Association of Mixed Martial Arts) press conference as we gear up for BAMMA 6 on Saturday 21 May at Wembley Arena.

Aframe will be doing something quite exciting on the night, though perhaps not as exciting as the fights! We'll be tagging the event live, enabling international journalists, sponsors and editors to capture the precise bit of action simply by searching for it by text. Better than that, we'll be rolling out a brand new feature where the crew will be able to rough cut the footage on Aframe, so they can start putting together a package of highlights that can be shared with TV networks immediately after the fights have finished. Our aim is to tag, edit and send this footage on Saturday night for it to be aired in the US on the same night.

Finding media in a Semantic world

Wed, 04 May 2011 10:02:00 -0000

There are some interesting rumblings in the shadowy world of taxonomies and ontologies. This critical piece in the searching jigsaw could be about to be revolutionised in the incoming tide of the Semantic Web.

As we know, there are a number of elements necessary for effective search. An archive’s ability to be searched depends on “bottom up” information. This comes from catalogue information or metadata about the item in question. It also depends on a Search Engine which can effectively sift through the metadata to find the most suitable search result for a given search.

The jam in this sandwich is the taxonomy and/or ontology. The purpose of these systems is that they enable the user to organise, browse and find assets, and those that are related to them. The difference between the two systems is subtle. A taxonomy is a hierarchical classification system which creates parent child relationships between words. An Ontology is a system that ascribes meanings to words, which may be contextual, or related to ideas. Ontologies are therefore not hierarchical as such.

Without the help that a taxonomy or ontology provides, a piece of media would need to be metadated with every literal and contextual meaning. A picture of an Oak tree may be tagged with the words “Oak Tree, Acorns, Leaves”, or logged as “Oak Tree in full leaf with acorns”. Searching for “English Woodland Trees” would not however bring you this media based on these descriptions, although feasibly the media would be useful in this search without the help that a taxonomy would bring. Searching for the term Green Environment would also not bring up such an image - although again, this might be a useful search result.

Whilst such systems are necessary for efficient and intuitive discovery, the creation of such systems can often hardly be described as such. Taxonomies and ontologies are largely created manually for an individual archive within specific Asset Management Systems. For example, SmartLogic’s Ontology Manager, gives the capability for Ontologies to be created and managed and archives have frequently employed significant teams of people to do this job on a full time basis.

Medical Ontologies are a good example of the potential complexity; the Gene Ontology (GO) is one of the largest in terms of users and breadth of subject. It includes over 11 million annotations of which half a million have been manually verified by specialist curators in different communities on the basis of the analysis of experimental results reported in 52,000 scientific journal articles. Unfortunately, the very success of this approach has led to a proliferation of ontologies, which then requires management to create interoperability between the ontologies.

WordNet, unlike most taxonomies/ontologies, is not subject specific. Developed and published from Princeton University, WordNet acts as a cross between an ontology and a taxonomy, describing itself instead as a “lexical database” for the English language. It groups English words into sets of synonyms called synsets, provides short, general definitions, and records the various semantic relations between these synonym sets. The purpose is twofold: to produce a combination of dictionary and thesaurus that is more intuitively usable, and to support automatic text analysis and artificial intelligence applications.

In 2007, two academics working in Heidelburg, Ponzetto and Strube, found another way of doing it. They acknowledged that creating knowledge bases is expensive and they are time-consuming to maintain. Instead they created a taxonomy out of Wikipedia. They took Wikipedia’s categories and mapped how they were related. Through this they could extract meaning which created an ontology that can be applied to other datasets. The subsequent system was as good as manually created ontologies.

The future may derive from this important piece of work, with some help from the Semantic Web, and in particular Open and Linked Data.

The answer to these issues may lie in the Semantic Web and expressed through Open and Linked Data. These movements are growing in import and uptake.

Open Data enables data that hitherto was available to a closed subset of users (for example within a company’s internal asset management system), to be made available openly on the Web. This data is published in a unified language called RDF. Open Data practices are being adopted increasingly across archives, although largely in text and data heavy disciplines. For example, the UK Government has launched data.gov.uk which publishes over 5000 significant datasets on government spending and organisation. This has launched an industry of applications and bright ideas on how the data could be used: maps showing where planning applications have been successful, maps showing the pattern of arts grant spending and so on.

There are outstanding issues to be resolved in doing this for AV archives, but progress is steady. The BBC is also working to create Open Data for its archive, and will launch its first trial called the BBC Digital Public Space in June 2011.

Linked Data takes Open Data a step further by establishing relationships between datasets that can be read by computers. The principles of Linked Data were outlined by Tim Berners-Lee of W3C and revolves around four basic principles to create a system which identifies things (using Unique Resource Identifiers (URIs)), which can subsequently be found (using the well known HTTP), interpreted and understood (using RDF), and linked to similar things (using a concept called triples). Linked data can identify broad communities, including people, companies, books, scientific publications, films, music, television and radio programmes, genes, proteins, drugs and clinical trials, online communities, statistical and scientific data, and reviews.

The implications for this are broad. The net result is that our Oak Tree media, in an Open and Linked Data future, could be served to all manner of searches for English Woodland, Green Environment, without any need for a manual ontology that needs constant updating.

Whilst this is undoubtedly some time away, the principles of developing metadata that can be published openly and understood widely is the first step towards this nirvana.

Claire Harvey

Full transcription now available

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 10:01:00 -0000

The ability to convert speech into text is another addition to the search features on Aframe.

As a character says a line, the exact text is added to the specific timecode point underneath the clip, which again is fully searchable. This service is also provided by our team of [human] metataggers, so you won't run the risk of computer programmes making mistakes.

Video logging feature

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 10:00:00 -0000

To complement our video tagging service, we've added a brand new logging feature to make searching your footage even better.
Using our crack team of metataggers (or 'loggers' in old money), we can now add descriptive narrative as well as tags. This means you could search for "man" and "kitchen" as well as "man walks into kitchen, sound of washing machine in the background".

Improved reviewing experience

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 09:59:00 -0000

With all the additional information Aframe carries on each clip, we've redesigned this page to allow you to set what details are viewed. So now you can filter all of the logs, tags and comments information into a list with exactly what you want to see. You can also hide and reveal the the comments box and the clip info (which contains details on timecodes, audio, original file type, activity history, download options and a rename the clip function).

Clip titles can now be searched to make it even easier to organise your footage. We've enhanced the clip sorting tool too. You can now sort all of your clips by capture time, ingest time (when it was uploaded), camera serial, description and title in both ascending and descending order. When the clips are grouped into a collection, you can also move them around by hand, which is quite nifty.

Send clips to multiple people

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 09:58:00 -0000

When sending clips to other people you can now add more than one email recipient. Fantastically simple, fantastically useful.

Why the Future of Editing Is Out of Site

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 17:51:00 -0000

This is a re-posting of a blog by Eric Wise on his site Splice Vine that we thought was just brilliant:

"I recently caught an interesting interview on TWiT with the head of a company called Aframe. They promise to take the IT out of creativ-it-y. You know, the growing mountain of hi-resolution, metadata-infused media that we have to produce, parse, back-up, archive and pray that nothing goes wrong with.

That stuff.

As a self-described collaborative video platform, they boast of remote resources and capabilities that will benefit content creators large and small. The basic idea is that you would:

1. Shoot your content

2. Drop off the drive at one of their upload points

3. Upload the content which is simultaneously transcoded to proxy files and infused with metadata

4. Log the proxy files and make your selects with a robust media management system

5. Download only what you need for your off-line edit

6. Reconform back to your original files when you are ready for online and finishing

7. Archive the original media at a lower price once your project is over and your media is no longer active

And I guess number 8 could be to wonder where they have been all of your life.

Yeah I know, the devil’s in the details, right? Well, I have to admit that even after finding out some of the details, I was still pretty impressed. Some of them are:

• The network of upload points are fiber lines that are 400 km apart. As far as I know they are currently only in the UK with plans to expand the service to the LA area and eventually other US cities.

• The data centers are privately owned and controlled. There are 2 data centers (London & NE of England) Both are mirrored and active (which means that if one goes down your files will still be online. (Note: This is a big deal and potentially protects against the type of disaster that recently happened with Amazon Web Services).

• There are 5 layers of realtime meta-tagging. Passive (camera) data is automatically added. Active (production notes) data can be added for a fee.

• There is controlled access to all content

• There are online vs archive rates. They make money when you make money.

• Local storage can be another instance of Aframe

• There are software updates every 2-weeks

• There is API integration available for users

• There will be integration with Final Cut Pro X if and when Apple releases an API to developers

Price?

The rough numbers are about $0.17/gb for media that is actively being used. They say the price will come down once the media is archived. So if you do the math, you’d be paying roughly $1700/mo for 10 TB of media being used in an active project. Again, this number will go down once the media is archived. Still sounds like a lot? I guess it depends on your situation. In the very least it makes you want to break out the calculator. How does that monthly fee compare to buying, amortizing and supporting your SAN and archiving systems? You know, the ones that can be incredibly expensive and obsolete by the next NAB.

It’s too early to know whether Aframe will catch on or not. I’m sure many people will have questions about privacy, security and reliability. And it’ll probably re-ignite the debate on outsourcing and commoditization. But there’s no denying that the trend of PAAS (Platform as a Service) and other cloud-centric movements may finally be ready for a wider range of Post-Production budgets. A couple of weeks ago at NAB, Avid introduced Interplay Central which is a cloud-based editing platform. And one can only dream of the implication that Apple’s much-rumored cloud-based iTunes music service could have on Final Cut Pro.

Later on this week I look at other kindred services like Wiredrive and FileCatalyst. I’m all for any tech that keep obstacles out of mind and bottlenecks out of site."

Aframe @ NAB

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 17:50:00 -0000

During his visit to the NAB show last week, Aframe CEO David Peto managed to get an interview on the prestigious This Week in Tech radio show, which was broadcasting live from the show.

In the TWiT Live Special, he gets a little longer than the 15 minutes originally allocated and even swaps business cards with the presenter at the end!

What's new in Aframe?

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 17:04:00 -0000

We're out of private beta (pass the champagne!), and there's a clutch of new features in Aframe we'll be writing about over the coming few weeks. So many, in fact that we'll be writing about most of them in individual feature pages.

Some of the great new features in Aframe:

• Send a large video file to someone to simplify sharing video

• Real-time comments

• Time-based comments

• Sortable metadata in your video tagging

• Automatically-generated web quality video

• Video upload from elsewhere

• Naming things

• The project owner can delete things

• Full-screen playback and keyboard control

• Better search so you can find video

• 256bit SSL encryption

• HTML5 throughout

• For developers we now have a beta API

As always, we have lots more behind the scenes and in development (Avid integration, anyone?) so we're actively looking for people to join our Beta programme, where you'll have access to exciting new features (for free) before they are released to everyone.

If you're interested, drop me a line on beta@aframe.com

Stef

Aframe offers 'Agile Filmmaking'

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 09:02:00 -0000

Jake Bickerton, Features Editor at Televisual magazine , recently wrote a rather brilliant blog on Aframe, 'Tapeless system like Facebook'. Rather brilliant because he manages to describe our wonderful system in wonderfully simple language – an enviable skill. So over to you, Jake...

'One of the unavoidable truths is everything is going file-based. This is accepted as a reasonably good thing by many who've given file-based production a try, though, whatever the production, there are still plenty of niggles to sort out each time.

An often cited and potentially catastrophic issue when going file-based is ensuring rushes are kept safe and aren’t accidentally erased or put onto a single hard drive that gets corrupted resulting in the loss of irreplaceable footage.

There are a number of ways to create a safe environment for file-based rushes, principally based around the role of the DIT who, on location, takes care of offloading file-based rushes from memory cards to hard drives, backing up the information and preparing the cards for reuse.

The management of these rushes after the shoot can often be a bit messy though, with rushes sometimes being badly labelled up and no one quite sure who should take responsibility of the drives.

A newly launched “online video production” tool called Aframe, aims to make the transition from tape-based to file-based production much more straightforward by creating a Facebook-style environment providing a safe, instantly accessible online home for your rushes.

The way it works is that, on location, rushes are uploaded onto your Aframe space where anyone in the production team can access the production pages to review the content, leave comments and so on. The rushes are automatically logged in real-time by a team based in Sunderland to make all the content searchable.

When it comes to post production, you then drag and drop the rushes from your Aframe account into the editor, and transfer the edit back again after each session. Once cutting is finished, Aframe replaces the lower res proxy images of the offline edit with the full res originals.

The full res cut is then available via Aframe to those working on the vfx, grading, audio and all other finishing stages.

Once a production is finished, the rushes remain on your Aframe account and proxy versions are instantly accessible whenever required. Aframe also has a system to monetise clips from your archive by selling appropriate material as stock footage to other Aframe users.

Aframe was co-created by ex-Unit md David Peto. The company behind Aframe raised £2m for its launch, and already has customers including Middlechild Productions, RDA TV, Ten Alps, Press Association, Red Earth Studios, Zig Zag Productions, Carbon Media and The Crewing Company.

“Aframe replaces hard drives, bikes and FTP, replacing it with instant, agile filmmaking,” says Peto. “There are loads of people archiving irreplaceable data onto £100 external hard drives. This isn’t surprisingly – why should a creative company be an IT company? We make the process affordable and easy to do, meaning they can focus on making programmes.”

“Aframe is a web-based tool that takes you through the process from the front-end. You can plan the entire production within the system, upload proxy files from the shoot, share them, etc. All of it has metadata attached and is searchable. We bring down five hours worth of editable quality clips in 30 minutes. You do the edit, then press a button and it grabs the high-res versions.”

The system is subscription-based so if you stop using it you have to take your content back again. And while it appears to offer a convenient one-stop shop for rushes management on file-based productions, it’s doing very little that you couldn’t already do before, albeit with separate packages.

“You could do all the bits of Aframe before,” admits Peto, “But they were all separate and you didn’t have the chance to integrate each of the parts, so it was all quite difficult to use. We’ve taken all the bits and built Aframe from the ground up, and built it so it’s very easy to use. It’s as easy to use as Facebook.”

The cost for an individual user of Aframe starts from £14.99 a month, while £399 a month buys you a plan for five projects and 10 users, 2.5TB of storage and access to the whole system. It’s pay as you go and you can ramp up and increase storage when required and then drop it back down to the original plan.

“We keep the finished programme and an archive of all the rushes. All proxy copies of long-term archive storage are kept online and are still usable,” adds Peto. “We also organise clip sales of redundant clips, with the buyers being other Aframe users.”’

- Jake Bickerton, 22 March 2011

The Ticking Time Bomb: 40% of Production Industry have Lost Footage Forever

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 09:01:00 -0000

I've finally stuck my head above the parapet. And it feels good.
I've had my head down getting Aframe out of Private Beta - and it's been an amazing feeling as we've picked up clients and launched our pricing to the world. It's not difficult to imagine what the reaction has been to giving anyone the power of a full blown production system for £14.99 a month.

The best part has been seeing us create a system that actually works, with huge amounts of media, in any format, and people can actually understand how to use it.

And we've done it for a million pounds - whereas the figures spent by others only for them not to succeed are mind numbingly enormous.

But even getting this money wasn't easy - and that's because until now, there simply wasn't any data available on how bad the problem of lost data really is in the Professional Video industry.

Everyone knows a story about someone who's had a hard drive blow up on them and everyone also knows a story of the data being irreplaceable footage. And they get worse - entire productions lost, days worth of filming in remote locations with multiple cameras gone, even an accidental deletion of an entire series. In the worst case - a facility that lost the entire contents of its live central storage system..

Two things strike me about this:

1.) Tapeless filming has been sold to all of us much like the "HD Ready" TVs of five years ago. The telly was great, but there was no way of actually watching HD on it, and to add insult to injury the Standard Definition picture quality was worse than on our old TVs.

Tapeless is the same - the cameras are great - hell, you can shoot 35mm-esque footage on a DSLR now - but the moment you let go of the record button you enter a world of pain, with masses of data flying out - and no-one has given you a way of handling it without masses of expense.

2.) Whilst it's easy enough to get someone to privately talk to you about the data they've lost, funnily enough, no-one wants to talk publicly about it.

So - we decided to finally get things out into the open. At the end of February, we commissioned research that allowed production professionals, via anonymity, to be open and honest for the first time.

And the results are staggering:

65% of people have had a hard drive blow up on them

Think that's bad - wait;

25% of people had it happen - 3 times

And;

11% have had it happen 5 times

Wow.

Now - this is really bad - but if it didn't actually matter too much - nothing got affected - well, it's annoying, but you'll live.

However, here comes the kicker.

Nearly 40% have therefore lost irreplaceable production footage

And 10% have had it happen to them more than 3 times.

Let's do some quick maths. The UK Production industry has a turnover of £4 billion across production and post production. If 40% of media is at risk, at any one time up to £1.6 billion of material is at risk each year. And this grows as each year passes. And this doesn't count the cost of the delays, reshoots and more.

And the volumes of media being shot are going up.

And in all likelihood you, as the content creator are uninsured for that loss - and are at risk of being in breach of contract with whoever you made the content for.

So - how do you sort it? Basically, you used to need redundant storage in multiple locations with tech staff that can cuddle it, and protect against things like accidental deletion, unauthorised access etc.

This makes you an IT company - which I'm fairly certain you didn't set out to become when you first went into video production.

And that's why we built Aframe.

So - the reality is finally out in the open. At the very least it's going get a debate going.

I can't wait.

David

Crewing Company takes 200 Aframe licences

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 17:58:00 -0000

We're as keen as mustard to make sure that everyone knows that Aframe isn't just for companies, big or small - it's also for the hard working freelancers who make up the backbone of the production industry. With an Aframe account, they get to take all of their materials, such as favourite call sheets, clearance forms, and schedules with them, wherever they go.

But the best bit is it that by putting their great work on their Aframe account, they can instantly show potential employers their skills wherever they are - whether they've bumped into them in the pub or they are in another country.

And once they've won the job, they are instantly ready to start making the show, commercial, news item or movie with them, on Aframe. As well as being available to a host of new employers via the Aframe database.

That's why we're so excited that the Crewing Company have taken 200 licences of Aframe for their pool of freelancers working across all sectors of the industry.

It's been picked up in the press - by 4RFV

60 second Video Production Solution

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 16:17:00 -0000

Sometimes it’s easy to forget we’re a start-up. We didn’t feel like a start-up last week at the Production Show – all you could see was Aframe! So it was refreshing to be recognised as a hot start-up by the lovely chaps at Smarta, the networking resource for anyone starting and running a small business.
They used one of their “60 second start-up” articles to showcase Aframe’s David Peto, CEO and serial entrepreneur.

Aside from slightly exaggerating the golden handshake from his previous venture, it’s a good elevator pitch for the brand and an interesting test for David to squeeze in all of Aframe’s attributes in one minute. Does he manage it?