24 TVBEurope IBC Wrap-Up Cloudy with a chance of metadata
A cloud hung over almost every hall at IBC, with services on offer for almost every part of the production chain including encoding, scheduling, promotion, sales and post. David Fox spoke with two big companies behind the clouds
TWO OF the most interesting new offerings in the cloud were from Sony and Panasonic, each with different approaches: Sony working from the enterprise down to the one-man band, Panasonic from the camera to the newsroom. Sony’s Ci is already in use,
having been launched at NAB, but it is still in beta, and Naomi Climer, president, Sony Media Cloud Services, said: “We’re not going to finish this, ever. It’s going to be in continual development.” Ci allows lots of people to
view and comment on material, or to create and manage an archive. “It’s also a great way to get material from one place to another,” she said. “It’s not one tool that tries to
be everything to everybody. There is a ‘work in progress’ content creation side and a content
Ahead in the clouds: Naomi Climer believes Ci will speed up workflows
sharing and curation level. There is a huge overlap between the two, but a distinct difference in the design and feel.” The two sections are Workspace, for content creation and video production, and MediaBox, which is more of an organisational tool. The key theme to both is
collaborative production, with
several different applications available via the browser. At IBC these included three new apps: Ci RoughCut, which can produce EDLs for Avid or Final Cut Pro, and Ci AudioReview and Ci VideoReview, for reviewing, annotation, and collaboration. For content creation, it is a
quick way of getting material back from location, and to reduce bandwidth needs a lot of the workflow is based on proxies. “It means editors and senior personnel can start looking at material very early,” she said.
She sees it as “a tool that quite
realistically could work for an individual and for an enterprise. An organisation could have thousands of users on it. Sony Pictures is using it pretty intensively for stock footage, archive, editorial and for a new
movie.” It also uses it for sharing marketing material, while the University of Southern California film school uses it for content collaboration and marking. Another possible use is for
legal reviews, especially for fast-turnaround reality TV, helped by the ability to comment by frame, so there need be no ambiguity. It is easy to jump to any frame, so that if a producer is talking to an editor they can be sure they are looking at the same thing. As it is a service, “it is ideal
for customers who can’t get more capital expenditure, but can afford operational budget for storage,” she said. Users can sign up online free to the creation workflow, with limited storage (5GB), buying extra storage only when they need it. If you upload HD it
can generate the proxy, or you can just upload the proxy if you have limited bandwidth. MediaBox supports Aspera uploads (which will also come to Workspace), which can cope with 4K and reduce latency. There is also a very simple to use iOS App. “We want to achieve that [simplicity of use] with any camera on the planet. We can see opportunities throughout our hardware to make it cloud enabled. We want to help people to collaborate and share content,” she added. “We can imagine quite a lot of things within the Sony world we want to do. It will be available all the time, as part of the new agile world.” Sony announced wireless
camera-to-cloud connectivity for its new and existing camcorders at IBC, with access to Ci via a
www.tvbeurope.com November2013
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