Latest posts and blogs from the Key Code Media team

Editorial Management: Bridge The Gap Between Avid & Adobe Workflows

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Editorial Management: Bridge The Gap Between Avid & Adobe Workflows

NOW ON-DEMAND

In this INPUTS/OUTPUTS, we’re taking a look at the latest release of Avid MediaCentral | Editorial Management. The latest release of Avid’s collaborative hub is receiving a significant update- addressing feedback from customers, providing a collaborative hub for producers, editors, and production teams throughout the creative process.

Post teams that use both Avid and Adobe clients sometimes struggle to collaborate across platforms—but it doesn’t have to be that way. That’s why Avid and Adobe are partnering to bring your Post Production teams a whole new world of efficiency.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT EDITORIAL MANAGEMENT?

Contact us for pricing or schedule a private demonstration. Key Code Media is the #1 Avid reseller worldwide.

Key Code Media Expands Team in California

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Key Code Media Expands Team in California 

The Key Code Media Team Hires Matt Stamos For Northern California, Promotes Robert Parker, and Expands Brian Borings Territory Into The West Side

The Key Code Media team adds more Account Manager staff to better foster business relationships throughout California. With COVID impacting all of our customers, there comes a greater need for providing a highly-engaged-customer service experience that will allow customers to grow and demo new A/V Broadcast, and Post Production equipment for their facilities, productions, council chambers, or classrooms.

Starting with Matt Stamos in San Francisco! Matt Stamos has over 32 years of experience in the audiovisual and broadcast industries, holding regional positions at some of Key Code Media’s top partners- JB&A Distribution, NewTek, and Quantum. Matt will be joining Key Code Media as a regional sales manager for the Northern California region- including the San Francisco bay area, San Jose, and Sacramento. In this new role, Matt will be supporting local city government, education, production, and tech/corporate video departments to navigate complex audiovisual, broadcast, and production equipment decisions.

“I’m really excited to start supporting Key Code Media customers in the Northern California territory. COVID has caused a rapid shift in ip-based audiovideo equipment and remote production needs for business- I’m hoping to use my deep technical knowledge to help customers find and adopt the right technology.”

– Matt Stamos, Northern California Account Manager

In Southern California, Robert Parker– a seasoned and knowledgeable inside sales rep has been promoted to Regional Account Manager for the San Fernando Valley, Santa Barbara, and San Bernardino County.

“Robert has shown exceptional growth over the last couple of years working at Key Code Media. He quickly grasped and has demonstrated his focus in high-levels of customer satisfaction..” – Mike Cavanagh

– Mike Cavanagh, President of Key Code Media

Veteran Industry Leader and Director of Business Development, Brian Boring, will expand his customer support region to the West Side- supporting customers in Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Marina Del Ray, Manhattan Beach, and surrounding west side regions.

“My background has always been supportive of the high-demand needs of our Media & Entertainment customers. Moving into the West Side areas, I look forward to helping television networks, post houses, and advertising agencies develop new high-end workflows and navigate the current challenges with remote production.”

– Brian Boring, Director of Business Development

Key Code Media business has remained steady throughout the pandemic, as customers look to find new ways to leverage professional video and audio solutions to communicate and collaborate remotely. Prior to the pandemic, the company transitioned all their purchasing and communication to cloud-based infrastructure, allowing efficient fulfillment and support of our clients during these challenging times.

What is ShareBrowser? Media File & Asset Management

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What is ShareBrowser? Media File & Asset Management

Below we will breakdown the key features and application within SNS’s suite of media management tools. We will also highlight SNS NOMAD for remote post production, and Slingshot automation tools.

If you have any questions, or are interested in learning more about SNS EVO or ShareBrowser- contact Key Code Media.

What is ShareBrowser? | EVO Storage (Episode 1)

The backbone of ShareBrowser is EVO shared storage. EVO is a high-performance shared storage server that includes a powerful suite of tools to help content creators collaborate, store, share, and organize their media. Instead of copying files to your computer from a direct-attached drive, single-user RAID, or your drawer full of USB sticks, EVO puts all your media into a centralized location. This allows all your team members to access and collaborate on projects and files in real-time.

In order to leverage the ShareBrowser media management tool, you must have at least one SNS EVO shared storage server on the network. However, once an SNS EVO is installed, ShareBrowser will help you organize your files on the network — regardless of if the files are on your SNS EVO or anywhere else on the network.

What is ShareBrowser? | ShareBrowser Introduction (Episode 2)

ShareBrowser is the built-in media asset management software included with every EVO system in unlimited fashion. This allows everyone on a team to tag footage, add comments, preview clips, and search across all the storage available on a network. Let’s review a basic example.

Starting with ingest — let’s say you have a direct-attached drive connected to your computer. That drive will now appear within ShareBrowser, along-side all other mounted shared storage volumes and cloud storage like Dropbox and AWS. From here, you can preview clips and add tags and notes, which can later be used for editorial.

Moving the files to your shared storage is easy — simply copy/paste into the project folder. When you paste the files, a verification check comparing the copy to the original is automatically triggered, so everything shows up like it’s supposed to. If you’ve ever copy/pasted files from a hard drive and experienced weird artifacts or audio issues, the paste and verify feature will make sure that never happens again.

For enterprise productions with a lot of media, and a lot of projects going on simultaneously — or, if you have ever had to stop editing while files from a drive are being copied over to a system — ShareBrowser provides a unique solution. By using the File Handling feature you can throttle the balance between read and write. This means you can decide how much bandwidth will be used for the coping, while protecting the bandwidth used by your online video editors. No more waiting for file copies — just keep editing!

ShareBrowser also has robust medata-tagging and search tools. Metadata tagging is as simple as a type-and-save, and also allows you to do recursive tagging — making sure all the files inside a folder get tagged, including pdfs, video files, audio files, and essentially any type of file on the system.

You can then select a clip or a selection of clips and import them directly into a Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, or Resolve project. When clips are imported, it brings with it all the metadata that was tagged in ShareBrowser.

What is ShareBrowser? | Sharebrowser Web App (Episode 3)

Different team members have different needs out of a media asset management system. With that in mind, you can leverage ShareBrowser through a web browser. This allows any user to review and tag clips, review rough cuts, and organize files into bins. A majority of features that are in Sharebrowser are available in the Web App. However the Web App doesn’t require you to install anything — users just type in the IP address to the EVO and get started.

This could be incredibly useful for someone that just needs to quickly select a few clips and add them to a bin.

It’s important to remember, is that ShareBrowser metadata is universal, it follows your media throughout the production pipeline, even after a project is sent to archive. The metadata would never get locked away into a specific production application — something many editors may have experienced with other media management platforms. This allows production teams to use metadata across all production applications instead of just one specific piece.

What is ShareBrowser? | Sharebrowser Panel For Adobe Premiere Pro (Episode 4)

Rather than digging through a bunch of folders in the Media Browser, ShareBrowser users will have access to the ShareBrowser Panel For Adobe Premiere Pro. This extension is available for free in the Adobe Exchange. With the ShareBrowser panel open, you can browse files on all your networked storage, search for clips, and import media directly into Premiere Pro — all without ever having to leave the Premiere Pro application. This panel extension is also available for After Effects.

Tags, comments, and other metadata logged in ShareBrowser will be visible within the Premiere Pro Bin. From there, an editor can sort and search files based on any of the metadata from ShareBrowser. This makes it easy to find shots, or group together music and sound effects files. 

SNS NOMAD – Remote Access For SNS EVO

With increased demand from post-production teams for work-from-home solutions SNS is proud to release Nomad, a powerful remote editorial tool that comes free with EVO shared storage solutions. Nomad can be used to provide a quick transition to remote workflows for Adobe, FCPX, Resolve, Avid and more. Nomad complements existing EVO features such as Automation, Replication, MAM, AI, and Cloud integration and works with your existing storage. Learn more about this quick, simple, free way to get your work done from home.

Slingshot — Automations GUI & API for EVO Shared Storage Servers

Slingshot is an automations GUI and API designed from the ground up to address today’s workflow challenges and give you more control over your post-production operations.

With Slingshot, you can create and run automated file workflows that span EVO, all sorts of other systems, and even cloud storage. Many users use Slingshot to automatically backup and sync their files to tier 2 storage or a cloud backup location like Dropbox, Amazon S3, or Microsoft Azure.

Slingshot boosts productivity by enabling you to automate repetitive file management tasks, leaving you and your team with more valuable time in post.

Learn More About ShareBrowser From The Experts At Key Code Media. Contact Us:

Collaborate Better! Sharing Avid, Adobe, Autodesk, Resolve Projects Across The Team

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Collaborate Better! Sharing Avid, Adobe, Autodesk, Resolve Projects Across The Team

Live Stream | Thursday (10/08) | 10 AM PDT/1 PM ET

SPONSORS

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Empower Your Team To Collaborate Better

Production teams no longer use just a single tool to tell a story. Graphics teams may need to work in Autodesk, Colorist has their favorite settings in DaVinci Resolve and Editors might be split between Premiere Pro and Media Composer. You need a strategy to get all these teams, projects, and files organized in a way that enhances collaboration and sharing.

In this episode of Broadcast2Post, we’re diving deep into best practices for enhancing collaboration and sharing using the most popular creative video tools in a cohesive workflow. First, Jeff is going to dive into the ground rules of configuration. Second, we’re inviting our technology partners to demonstrate a few collaboration tools to consider. Then we’ll end the show with a panel discussion of post production customers and industry experts answering your questions live.

You don’t want to miss this one.

GUEST SPEAKERS

  • Suzanne Greenfield
    SVP, POST PRODUCTION
  • Dan Gordish
    TECHNICAL SUPERVISOR
Suzanne and Dan know the ins-and-outs of a robust post-production workflow at Boardwalk Pictures. Boardwalk Pictures is an award-winning multimedia production company that develops and produces factual content for a variety of partners and distribution platforms.

With a primary focus on non-fiction, documentary content, Boardwalk is a filmmaker-driven company with a unique track record of producing premium and elevated series, features, and a variety of other programming for digital and brand clients.

CONTACT US

If you’re looking to setup a collaborative editing workflow for your facility- look no further! Our engineers are standing by to give you a free evaluation of the equipment you’ll need to be successful. Contact us for details!

Remote Live Streaming For Production Teams

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Remote Live Streaming For Production Teams

Broadcast Professionally From Your Home, or Anywhere

In this Broadcast2Post Episode, we’re inviting broadcast and live streaming professionals to dive into the tech and techniques of pulling off a remote live production. In just a few months, the live streaming industry has exploded 99%, as live events, sports, television broadcasts, conferences, corporate events, and lectures all move from physical events to online.

In this event, we’re going to focus on connectivity, remote guests, audience engagement and overall creating an efficient workflow for your next show. There will be live demonstrations from NewTek, LiveU, and SNS. Immediately following, we’ll bring together an industry panel of professionals sharing their experience pulling off successful remote production shows- from home, or anywhere.

SPONSORS

GUEST SPEAKER

Kathleen Burns, CEO of Cabana 512

Kathleen Burns is the founder/CEO of Cabana 512 Productions, a Los Angeles-based television production company specializing in non-fiction television, digital media and branded entertainment. Burns is a 20-year veteran in the television industry and one of the most respected in the field.

Before starting Cabana 512 Production, Kathleen oversaw an impressive list of groundbreaking television, including: “Married at First Sight (FYI/A&E)”, as well as “Little Women: LA and Little Women: Atlanta (Lifetime)”, “The Taste (ABC)”, “Geeks Who Drink (SyFy)”, “Seven Year Switch (FYI)”, “Man vs Child: Chef Showdown (FYI)”, “My Diet is Better Than Yours (ABC) and “Betty White’s Off Their Rockers (NBC)”, “Dirty Jobs”, “American Chopper”, “The Ultimate Fighter” and “Ghost Hunters”.

During the Pandemic, Kathleen has been working alongside industry-leading production teams to come up with engaging live content, that provides the audience a thrill, while also keeping the production team safe. Her latest project will provide audiences a spooky live Halloween event from the Haunted Queen Mary, including live music performances and a virtual tour of some of the most haunted areas of the ship.

NEED HELP WITH YOUR REMOTE WORKFLOW?

The Key Code Media team is standing by to help you with any remote live streaming equipment or workflow solutions.

Shared Storage For Your Media Team- Top Things To Consider

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Key Code Media’s CTO Jeff Sengpiehl Dives Into Key Considerations For Creative Teams Looking To Collaborate Using Media Storage

In every industry, there are revolutionary leaps forward. For Mobile Phones, It was apps. For home video, it was streaming. In Content creation- it is shared storage for video.

In previous blogs, we’ve covered Key Questions To Consider When Purchasing 4K Storage, Premiere Pro Shared Storage, and even have a solution page covering storage & archive solutions. Today, we’re focusing on creating a guide, explaining the key terms, questions to ask, and basic solutions to consider when purchasing shared storage. We hope you enjoy- and don’t forget to contact us if you have any questions about which solutions will work best for your company.

What is Shared Storage for your Video Team? 

When computer driven video editing began, all the media files were stored on hard disk drives attached to each individual computer.   This was a giant leap forward from shuttling through videotapes, and passing them around, yet the disks still needed to be passed around through what became known as sneaker-net. Shared storage is where the Hard Disks are able to be centralized- and accessed by multiple members of a video editing team at the exact same time.

Today, Shared Storage is optimized for teams collaborating with a variety of non-linear editing software- Adobe Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro, Avid Media Composer- to name a few. Storage is also becoming more independent of operating system whether users are working on Mac or PC- although, admittedly there is still some room for improvement.

Workflow and Connectivity can also be very important when choosing the right storage. Do the projects your working on require security, backups, multiple file format delivery, producer or client review and approve functionality, and archive? Do you need certain workgroups or users to be limited to read-only access? There will be a variety of business decisions that need to be made prior to purchasing the right storage for your media operation.

Too file system, or not to file system? When do I need a SAN vs. NAS? How about archive? You certainly don’t want to lose projects or media. Let’s break it down:

  • What is NAS Storage? – A NAS is a single storage device that serves files over Ethernet and is relatively inexpensive and easy to set up. Source: Backblaze
  • What is SAN Storage? – A Storage Area Network is a tightly coupled network of multiple devices that work with block-based data and is more expensive and complex to set up and manage.  A SAN enhances the accessibility of shared storage devices  by making them appear to users as if they were external hard drives on their local system. Source: Backblaze
  • What is Archive Storage? – Typically, archive is an affordable, secure, reliable, and long-lasting storage tier- used to store media and files that are not actively being used by the SAN or NAS storage. The most common archive storage mediums are Tape as LTO or Cloud storage.

When you sit down to discover your options for Shared Video Storage,  there are questions you should already have answers to have:

  • What Video Editing Software does your Production or Media Team use-  Do you share media between different Software packages?  Adobe Premiere,  Avid Media Composer,  DaVinci Resolve-   What is or are the editing tool(s) of your trade?
  • What format of video will you be working with, and having to deliver.  HD,  4K?
  • What Video Codecs will you be using,  and will you utilize a full resolution workflow,  or a Proxy and Finish configuration?  Some codecs take up more space then others,  some are very processor intensive on your editing systems.    DPX or EXR is easy on computers,  but heavy on storage.   H.264/H.265 puts load on your computer, yet is easy to deliver to the system and takes up a lot less space from the storage side. Apple’s ProRes and Avid’s DNX are middle of the road for quality and storage needed
  • How many streams will be needed per system?  Is it single camera or multi-camera?   How many systems will need to see the same streams at the same time? Will there be utility systems for tasks like ingest, or uploading finished materials?   Some utility tasks are more storage intensive then editing.  And when you Automate those,  if the storage doesn’t keep up,  they will keep trying,  making it difficult for storytelling users.
  • How much material will you need to keep available for the team at once?  How much storage do you need?   This figure will be in Hours-  and when looked at with the codecs involved,  tells us how much storage this will need to be in Terabytes-  or maybe Petabytes.  Math-  it’s always here somewhere.  How big does this bucket really need to be? 
  • What level of data and system redundancy do you need?   How does the system handle itself if it loses a disk?  How about two?    Are you required to keep copies of data to guard against failures,  or things like malware attacks?    Technology for RAID, mirroring and pre-emptive repairs handles some of these tasks on certain systems.  Designing a system that has extra tiers of storage,  Disk, Tape or Cloud can keep you safe through many possible calamities

What is Network Infrastructure and why it matters?  

Network Infrastructure is the road to your media team’s collaboration.  Some roads are built to move fast sports cars from point to point.   Some are built to move heavy trucks of freight all over.   Sometimes the network you’ve had is a series of back-alleys-  Full of potholes and not able to move fast,  nor a lot at once.  It’s hard to make a leap forward when your roads slow you down like this.   

Networking consists of network switches– the nerve center, high-speed network cards that go into the video team’s computer workstations,  and the physical cabling between them- fiber, ethernet, or fiber-over-ethernet. There are network cable categories (Cat 5, Cat 6, Cat 7) with higher numbers being better and faster.   There are video-specific switches with deep buffers that will handle larger video file formats, and there are cards that are able to be tuned to work well with video, as opposed to Powerpoint and Email.   

Key Code Media has network engineers and low-voltage C-7 certified people on staff across the country that can help you pick the best networking for your budget.  We work with the most popular video networking manufacturers like Arista, Cisco, and Netgear.

Cat Capabilities By Category:

CategoryShieldingMax Transmission Speed (at 100 meters)Max Bandwidth
Cat 3Unshielded10Mbps16 MHz
Cat 5Unshielded10/100Mbps100 MHz
Cat 5eUnshielded1,000Mbps / 1Gbps100 MHz
Cat 6Shielded or Unshielded1,000Mbps / 1Gbps250 MHz
Cat 6aShielded10,000Mbps / 10Gbps500 MHz
Cat 7Shielded10,000Mbps / 10Gbps600 MHz
Cat 7aShielded10,000Mbps/10Gbps1,000Mhz

Media Management, Automation Tools – enhancing your collaboration with built in tools.

For some productions, just having to only keep one copy of their media,  and being able to share projects and bins has been just what they needed.   However, many video storage systems offer tools to help manage media, and projects-  with integrated panels inside popular Non-Linear Editing software (like Avid, Adobe, and Resolve), as well as Web-Browser tools to play, annotate, sub-clip and sequence media. Review and approval methods, metadata tagging and search-    Not to mention automation of rendering, and moving media into different systems, between storage tiers,  Tape Libraries , or Cloud Storage Archives.     Storage systems such as EditShare, Facillis and SNS EVO have integrated Media Management.  Others, Like Avid have adjacent Media Management that bolts on.   And-  there are always Specific Media Management platforms to cover very specific or enterprise-wide needs that may fit your team’s particular needs-  solutions such as Frame I.O., CatDV and IPV.

We’ve given you quite a few things to think about –   wouldn’t it be great to sit down and chat with some folks who knows how shared storage, shared workflow, management of assets and how shared tools can benefit your Post Production teams?  Contact us here at Key Code Media –   with decades of combined Engineering, workflow and design experience,  we are The Media Storage Experts.  

An Example of a Typical Setup – Small, Medium/Large Post Production Teams

As teams and the type of projects they work on grows in scale, so does the need for a different storage configuration. Here are a few examples:

Small Team – Desktop Storage

Some Small Team Recommended Shared Storage Options- We Can Provide You:

SNS EVO Prodigy

Typical Users:

1-2 Team Members

Key Benefits of Desktop Storage:

  • No Server Room Required
  • Affordable
  • No Special Cooling Required
  • Quiet Enough To Live On Desk

Perfect For:

Small one-project focused team, traveling production, live events, single-user

Medium / Large Team – Server Storage

Some Medium / Large Team Recommended Shared Storage Options- We Can Provide You:

SNS EVO Shared Storage

Avid NEXIS Shared Storage
Editshare EFS Shared Storage

Facilis HUB Shared Storage
Quantum Stornext Shared Storage

Typical Users:

2-100+ Team Members

Key Benefits:

  • Typically comes with basic asset management functionality
  • Full-sized rackable server
  • Server Room or Mobile Rack Recommended
  • Easily Change Hard Drives
  • Expandable to over a petabyte

Options For Larger Teams:

  • Redundant Fail-Proof System
  • Multiple storage and Metadata controllers
  • Full-sized rackable server
  • Server Room or Co-location Recommended
  • Easily Change Hard Drives
  • Expandable to several petabytes

Perfect For:

Medium-to-Large sized creative and finishing teams, multiple-projects, documentary, remote offices, IT resources, corporate video teams, Single Feature or Episodic TV creative teams.

What Should I Do Next?

Contact Key Code Media and we will give you a free evaluation of your shared storage and post production needs. We have certified engineers that install and support every major shared storage brand, in some of the most successful production teams across the US.  

Telestream Wirecast Gear – Live Production Bundles

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Get everything you need to build an NDI live streaming, multicamera production system and save $1,000 or more

Bundle the cameras, control surface and a fully configured live video streaming production system and you have what you need to broadcast high quality live video streams.

We’ve partnered with the best video equipment and live production software and hardware manufacturers in the business to put everything you need to setup, stream and record high quality, professional live video into a single kit. These all-in-one bundles will save you time and money and give you the power to produce broadcast-quality video out of the box.

Purchase any model of Wirecast Gear (310, 320 or 420), a custom-designed X-keys controller for Wirecast and three BirdDog PTZ cameras with NDI and receive a huge bundle discount. Bundle with 3 BDP100 cameras & PTZ Controller to get $1,000 off the bundle or with 3 BDP200 cameras to get the BirdDog PTZ Controller and XKeys FREE!

STEP #1 – Choose Your Wirecast Gear System

Wirecast Gear 310

• 7 remote guests via Wirecast Rendezvous conferencing
• Integrated intel graphics
• 250GB NVMe SSD OS drive
1TB SATA SSD media drive

Wirecast Gear 320

• 7 remote guests via Wirecast Rendezvous conferencing
• 4x SDI capture
• Integrated intel graphics
• 250GB NVMe SSD OS drive
1TB SATA SSD media drive

Wirecast Gear 420

• 7 remote guests via Wirecast Rendezvous conferencing
• 5x SDI capture + 1 program
output
• Dedicated NVIDIA Quadro GPU
• Supports up to 4 simultaneous
NVENC encodes without affecting
CPU

STEP #2 – Add the XKEYS Controller for Wirecast

XKEYS Controller for Wirecast

A USB controller with dedicated keys for
Telestream Wirecast.
Includes direct selection of 12 sources on five
layers, transition controls and much, much more.

STEP #3 – Add 3 BirdDog PTZ Cameras & Controller

$1,000 total bundle savings with
Wirecast Gear, XKeys, 3 BDP100
cameras and PTZ Controller
FREE Xkeys & PTZ Controller! A $2,259 total bundle savings with Wirecast Gear, XKeys, 3 BDP200 cameras and PTZ Controller

Contact Us – Key Code Media

Your preferred engineering team for live production solutions.

How To Build Your Own Subscription Streaming Service, Like Netflix

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HOW TO BUILD YOUR OWN SUBSCRIPTION STREAMING SERVICE, LIKE NETFLIX

NOW ON DEMAND

It doesn’t take a million viewers to create a great experience for your followers.

Film & TV creators, Online Content, Houses of Worship, Educators, and Content Owners are wondering- how can I build my own subscription streaming service like Netflix? Turns out, it’s a lot more turnkey and affordable to create your own website or app, filled with on-demand and live content created and curated by your content team. Do you want your service available on Apple TV, Roku, Android TV, Amazon Fire TV, Xbox, Samsung Tizen & Mobile Apps? That’s easy too.

Whether you’re looking to offer your audiences content for free, PPV live events or a monthly subscription charge, you can now easily create a library of content that can be searchable and categorized for easy navigation, hidden-or-visible based on membership subscription level, all while delivering high-quality video and high fidelity audio.

Join us for this very timely discussion on how people are creating their own streaming services, followed by a live Q&A with you- the audience.

SPONSORS

GUEST SPEAKER

Spence Bovee, EDGEtv

EDGEtv is the adventure lifestyle streaming service that entertains and inspires, taking viewers on journeys to the edge, producing and distributing stunning and vivid long and short-form content, telling authentic aspirational and compelling stories, across Action Sports, Travel & Adventure Lifestyle.

Its subscription streaming service is built on Vimeo OTT’s robust industry-leading technology and currently available on Roku, iOS, Android, Chromecast, and EDGEtv.com.

LEARN MORE

Would you like to build an OTT strategy with Key Code Media and Vimeo OTT? Contact us to learn more.

What Is EditShare FLOW? Video Collaboration & Asset Management

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EditShare FLOW is a media management platform that supports and manages media collaboration in a smarter way. While EditShare FLOW was originally designed to work as a media management tool for EditShare EFS shared storage, it has been opened up read, edit, and share all media- across multiple servers and USB devices- on a single post house network.

The EditShare FLOW workflow can be broken out into five separate products- FLOW, AirFLOW, FLOW Story, FLOW Automation, and FLOW Cloud. Below we break down each product and how it can help your media facility collaborate faster and easier.

What Is FLOW? | FLOW Introduction (Episode 1)

FLOW is EditShare’s Asset Management and Remote Collaboration toolset. Traditionally, FLOW asset management was only available with EditShare shared storage. While there are still benefits to having it with EditShare storage- it is now open to working with all third party storage devices available on a network.

FLOW Control is the web-based application for managing the FLOW system, an administrator can configure third-party storage destinations to be scanned, proxied, and used by FLOW. Currently, FLOW supports numerous storage instances as well as storage that can be read through standard network protocols like SMB or NFS. LTO Archive integration is also available.

The idea is that FLOW will become the central management system to all of your storage destinations- tape, cloud, and on-prem storage. All of the media can be proxied and viewed from anywhere in the world.

What is FLOW? | AirFLOW (Episode 2)

AirFLOW is EditShare’s web-based interface for enabling remote collaboration workflows. When a user logs into AirFLOW, they will see all the remote storage locations that the administrator has given them permission to see.

If you know the folder structure, you can browse the directory to the folder you would like to work with and start working with those clips.

 Search is powerful – A quick search will put all metadata at your fingertips A quick search will search every metadata field for every asset a user has permission to see, including file name, or any of the custom metadata that has been tagged. You can also do an Advanced search with filters and additional options.

Once you find the material that you’d like to work with you can play those files in the web browser. The proxy files that are generated are timecode accurate, framerate accurate, and can split to up to 8 channels.

In addition to playing the file in real-time, you can also place markers using the “M” key. Markers will allow you color code and comment on the timeline. Those markers then become searchable within the AirFLOW search as well.

Projects can also be created in AirFLOW. AirFLOW projects have a variety of permissions and settings allow you to share with select groups or individuals, or the entire network. Within Projects, bins can be created so you can begin to categorize and organize your media files. Using “in,” “out,” and “plus” buttons to create subclip in your bin.

A Sequence can also be created, although it is limited to one video track only. Any media inside AirFLOW can be dragged, dropped, and repositioned within an AirFLOW sequence. That sequence can later be opened within any supported NLE.

What is FLOW? | FLOW Story (Episode 3)

FLOW Story is a powerful editorial application for remote productions. Flow story allows a user to perform basic video, color, and audio editing from a web browser. FLOW Story can access, edit, and share media, projects, and sequences available on AirFLOW or from your local computer hard drive. While AirFLOW does most of the basics, FLOW Story has more advanced editing capabilities.

In FLOW Story, you can create multiple audio and video tracks, which then can be moved around, layered, with the ability for standard J-Cuts and L-cuts. Transitions- like dissolves and wipes- can be added.

FLOW Story also has basic ability for color correction, 3D movements and titles, mattes and keys, and some basic plugins.

The audio editing tab gives the ability to do volume and pan automation, as well as some basic audio plugins.

FLOW Story also has integration with popular stock footage sites like audio network and Pond5.  

FLOW Story can be directly published to Vimeo or YouTube. It can also be published to FLOW, with three different options- create sequence proxy, create clip for sequence, or upload unsynced local clips into FLOW.

What is FLOW? | FLOW Automation (Episode 4)

FLOW Automation adds an additional layer of intelligence to your FLOW system. The Automation application installs on Mac and Windows. It allows an administrator to come up with custom workflows or advanced automation using a software interface.

FLOW Automation interface is fairly straight forward to navigate. The best way to see its functionality, is by looking at a few examples.

Examples – Review/Approve Workflow – In this example, a custom metadata field called ‘request approval’ can be triggered. The system can be setup to email approvers assigned to file or project, generate a link to a proxy of the media, and send a custom email to the approver, informing them that the media is ready to be reviewed.

The approver can now select another custom metadata field called “approved.” The ‘approved’ trigger could then transcode the file to its deliverable format, then sends the file to a QC server, and based on the QC servers ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ a different notification can be sent back to the team with the QC error details.

FLOW Automations can be as easy or complex as the facility needs.

What is FLOW? | FLOW Cloud (Episode 5)

FLOW can interface with cloud storage or completely hosted in a cloud environment.

This is an open platform with broad compatibility across creative tools for editing, audio mixing, and grading. Enables high-performance cloud storage and collaborative editing.

Virtualized in AWS, and other public and private cloud environments, FLOW Cloud simplifies migration to the cloud with pre-configured and pre-tested EFSv solutions. These turn-key configurations allow you to immediately adapt your workflows from traditional, on-premise environments to cloud-enabled remote workflows.

What is HELMUT? | Adobe Workgroup Management

Helmut will help orchestrate, standardize, and streamline workflow for large Adobe workgroups. Editshare EFS and Flow customers enjoy seamless integration with the Helmut solution- offering complete project-based workflows for Adobe teams.

Helmut Groups into four separate modules- Helmut FX, Helmut IO, Helmut Cosmo, and Helmut Housekeeper. Let’s breakout It down:

Helmut FX extends the storage, administration, and media management capabilities of Editshare EFS and FLOW into user and project management for Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Audition. Helmut FX allows users to create projects from custom templates, auto-mount, and create folder structure. Users and Group permission settings can also be configured within FX. FX offers a single project management UI, where users can create, access, and lock their projects. 

Helmut FX solves major pain-points, like working with multiple versions of Adobe software, or workgroups using multiple operating systems in their workgroup.

Helmut IO focuses on input, export, transcode, and rendering of assets, sequences, and compositions. It frees up workstations, flow, and editors from doing routine transcoding tasks within a workflow. Backed by the power of Adobe Media Encoder, Helmut IO reduces the margin of error for users while simplifying the entire process of bringing media in-and-out of a workflow.

Helmut Cosmo is the centralized database for Helmut- tracking projects, asset usage, and project-based metadata. Cosmo facilitates the ability to synchronize FLOW’s database, EFS storage, and your adobe projects and related content. Cosmo also has web UI for exporting and uploading media directly into your adobe project- even while other editors may be actively working in a project.

Helmut Housekeeper automates and streamlines tasks such as project-based archive, restore, consolidation, and deletion within Editshare EFS. 

What is FLOW? | Next Steps

If you want to learn more about how FLOW fits into your post production workflow, contact us. Our engineers are standing by to help answer your questions, install your equipment, and support your overall workflow with our 24/7 service plans.

What Is Avid Media Composer | Enterprise?

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What Is Avid Media Composer | Enterprise?

Avid Media Composer has been the backbone editing software platform of choice for motion pictures, television, documentary post production and film schools for years. Media Composer has continued to be the standard for broadcast and productions that require a higher level of collaboration- large volumes of media, file deliverables, and teams working from anywhere. Not to mention Phrasefind, Scriptsync, and Pro Tools integration- but we can save that for another blog.

Avid Media Composer | Enterprise takes what Media Composer is good at and adds a new level of functionality for Facility Engineers, Director of Production Operations, and creative collaborators alike. Enterprise consists of three products- MediaCentral | Editorial Management, Avid MediaCentral | Cloud UX, and Media Composer: Distributed Processing. We will go over these in more detail below.

Alright, let’s get into the Avid Media Composer | Enterprise products and how it will help your post production become more efficient.

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Customizing Media Composer Layouts For Users

Media Composer | Enterprise allows an administrator to customize the Media Composer interface based on roles and functions at your post house or media facility. The site administrator can go into the specific settings for a user or a group, and select specific functions that can be performed. Different options and features can be toggled on/off, including function settings in the bins, tracks, outputs, project formats, project creation, framerates, and other tools within Media Composer. For security, the ability to export cuts, or export to file can also be added or removed for specific users.

The layout of the Media Composer UI can be customized and then standardized for specific users based on their role- like Assistant Editor, Editor, Producer- or other groups created by the facility engineer. This provides your team a clean slate, helping giving staff the tools they need while removing the clutter of features and menus that may confuse them.

Important Note: Avid MediaCentral | Cloud UX is required in addition to Avid Media Composer | Enterprise licenses to access the Enterprise Admin Tool.

MediaCentral | Editorial Management Puts Media and Projects In A Browser

Small to Mid-Size Post Houses that need to find footage fast, collaborate easily, and create stories quickly will dig the features in MediaCentral | Editorial Management. Facility administrators can allow their teams to access shared projects, files, and media from a web browser located on-premise, or anywhere in the world- depending on how you want it setup.

MediaCentral | Editorial Management can be really powerful for collaborating, reviewing, and providing feedback with timecode-based comments. Alerts can be setup, so users collaborating on a project can review feedback, and notes can even be reviewed directly inside a Media Composer or Adobe Premiere Pro timeline.

Assistant Editors can log metadata, and create simple timeline edits from a web browser, that can then be shared to other members of the team.

Similar to the customization available in Media Composer, files, features and layouts in Editorial Management can be fully customized down to users and groups.

Avid Media Composer | Distributed Processing Cuts Down On Coffee Breaks

You hit the export button in Media Composer, then what? Coffee time! No, no, no- get back to work!

Avid Media Composer | Distributed Processing allows you to offload exports and renders to any workstation on your network. You can also put your unused, or older computers, servers, and workstations to work by networking them together as a powerful media render and transcode farm. Distributed Processing can also be tracked, managed and monitored jobs based on a web-based dashboard.

While Distributed Processing is a simple product, it is an important one. Instead of waiting for jobs to complete, Distributed Processing keeps you in your creative zone, so you can continue working in Media Composer and have more time to spend crafting your story.

Adobe Premiere Pro And MediaCentral | Editorial Management

Avid is making a big push to open up its environments with other third party editing and graphics software used by large creative teams. The Adobe Premiere Pro integration is a big first step, giving Adobe users a MediaCentral | Panel accessible inside Premiere Pro. The Panel can be used to locate clips, sequences, and comments prepared by other collaborators in Editorial Management.

This means you can have Assistant Editors preparing simple sequences, tagging metadata, and assembling media that can then be pulled directly into the editors Adobe Premiere Pro timeline.

Project and File locking is also available to help teams collaborate without overwriting each other’s work.

The Road Ahead – Installing Avid Media Composer | Enterprise

To get the full value of Avid Media Composer | Enterprise, you’ll need to consider several products within suite. An evaluation call with be needed to assess the features that are needed, the amount of licenses and types of employees accessing the media, and how it will all connect into your greater production pipeline.

Contact us to get started: