NAB 2013 brought its usual fun and excitement. The front South Hall had the high profile booths that could double as a night clubs. They fly in models from Los Angeles just to scan your badge. But behind all the glitz and glamour of the front of the hall comes the heart and soul of NAB. Toward the back of South Hall you get the scrappier booths. The companies who are bringing new innovations to post production. This month in Tech Edge, we are going to look at three booths found toward the back of South Hall that were jammed the entire week. They are companies who consistently had crowds based on the content of their product.
Storage DNA
Storage DNA was showing their DNA Evolution LTO based archive solution. DNA Evolution is an intelligent LTO with LTFS archive and retrieval workflow solution that optimizes the management of file-based content to help media professionals work more efficiently and save costs. Additionally, DNA Evolution maintains the integrity of digital assets while ensuring content openness and future access. The LTO archival life, combined with DNA Evolution’s automated and periodic tape health checks, ensures the long-term protection and integrity of media.
How do they do this? They offer things such as a direct-connect architecture for faster archives and retrievals. This saves you hours or even days of retrieving your archive across a network. They use a browser based web interface, support for direct archiving of AAF/XML/EDL formats as well as the usual archive solutions such as watch folders. They support ARRIRAW files. They verify your archive annually. They offer third party support for Avid Interplay. They offer ™drag and drop∫ metadata tagging making tagging your archive media assets simple.
I met with Doug Hynes, Storage DNA’s Senior Workflow Specialist and I asked him who some of the early adopters of their technology were. His response was ™Well, James Cameron’s crew on his Deep Sea Challenge project trusted DNA Evolution to keep their camera masters safe while shooting in the Mariana Trench, at a depth of 35,787 feet (6.77 miles/10.90 km). The expedition included numerous science partners and shed light on the virtually unknown habitats in the New Britain Trench, the Challenger Deep, and the Sirena Deep.∫
I then asked Doug if he had any success stories on land, and he replied ™Authentic Television, who does high end reality television in Los Angeles, is saving loads of money in online storage costs, as well as man hours spent archiving and restoring.∫ For more on Storage DNA and DNA Evolution, visit their website at www.StorageDNA.com
Marquis Broadcast
Another booth that had people spilling into the isles was Marquis Broadcast. Marquis Broadcast makes products that streamline the editing process. Daniel Faulkner, who is the Business Development Manager for Marquis, tells us, ™Marquis Broadcast has been providing Media Integration products for over fifteen years, solving production systems challenges of interoperating between multi-vendor solutions.∫
Marquis’ featured product is called Project Parking. Daniel tells us ™Project Parking is the latest tool from Marquis Broadcast that helps you completely understand how your Edit Storage is being used and gives you the tools to organize your media to enable efficiency within this valuable storage. By eliminating orphan and or duplicate files, Project Parking helps to reduce expense additional edit storage and improves the reliability and speed of archiving at a project level.∫
What Project Parking does is looks at your Avid Project files and lets you clean them up, archive, restore, or transfer them. The cleaning offers so much more than you get out of the Media Tool provided by Avid. You can see your project size, detect orphaned files across the whole project and detect duplicated files. Its lets you archive and restore on a project basis or on a bin basis. Even if you have sprayed your media across a bunch of drives, Project Parking will wrangle it all up for you and move it to one location. It can also help you merge your media to one location or even transfer all of it intelligently to another location.
Have you ever had media go offline and you weren’t able to resync it? You then reimport it, but you are unsure if the orphaned files are still taking up space on your storage. Project Parking will detect any media that is redundant and optimize your storage so you get more out of your storage. Some of the adopters of this technology include ABC News and A&E. Both sites have saved thousands of dollars and gigs of storage space with Project Parking. For more on Marquis Broadcast, visit their website at www.marquisbroadcast.com.
Axle Video
Axle Video made their debut at this year’s NAB, and what a NAB it was for them. They won the Black Diamond Award from DV Magazine and that comes on the heels of winning a ™Best of∫ award at the 2012 IBC. Led by CEO, Sam Bogach, Axle Video makes asset management radically simple. Sam knows asset management very well, as he was product manager for Avid’s Interplay. In that role, Sam helped Interplay climb from just about one hundred installations to over a thousand.
Through a simple web browser interface, Axle lets you set up custom metadata as well as using all the standard common metadata. It allows you to play your proxy media via a web browser. There is a conversation view on your assets that allows people to discuss and comment on material. All comments are time stamped and are stored chronologically so you can collaborate in real time. Axel’s browser interface also allows drag and drop upload and download from a web browser. The web browser also allows you to export to a bin via XML to Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro 7 as well as Final Cut Pro X. It allows you to browse your assets inside and outside your office on everything from your tower, laptop or even iPad.
The thing that makes Axel really outstanding is that the user interface only has six buttons. The learning curve for this product is measured in minutes, not days. You can send your review and approvals to your clients and without even knowing anything about Axel, they will easily be able to review, approve and offer feedback on your work. They also use your existing storage and existing workflows.
I spoke with Sam Bogach and he says that ™NAB really blew us away; we had a small boot that was a mob scene. We had NBC, BBC, and HBO and also then we had community colleges, sports teams, and non-profits. Everyone form the big guys to the little guys see value in our product. Some of our early success stories are Berkley School of Music, and they are using it for all of their online media. The Post Group in LA are using it at all seven locations to communicate to customers and clients.∫
The cost of this product is a fraction of what other asset management systems cost. Axle keeps the cost in just under a few thousand dollars as opposed to the tens or even hundreds of thousands of other products. To see more on Axle Video, visit their website at www.axlevideo.com.
Steve McGrath is a Broadcast Sales Engineer for HB Communications. He has worked with NBC, ABC, CBS, NESN, NECN, Fox, ESPN, Pentagon, Powderhouse and many others. You can reach him at Steve.McGrath@HBCommunications.com