Archives: Technology Park

Television has changed more in the past fifteen years than its previous seventy years of existence. Between 1927 and 1997, our monumental breakthrough was going from black and white to color and the emergence of cable television. From 1997 to today, we have gone from cable to on-demand/DVR, bypassing cable altogether for services like Hulu and Netflix, moved from SD to HD, have had a re-emergence of 3D, gone from VHS to DVD to Blu-Ray, eliminated tape for file-based acquisition and now just a few years after we all bought HD televisionsºhere comes the 4K televisions.

All in all, it’s been a pretty busy decade. 4K (also known as Ultra HD or UHDTV) is double the pixel size of standard 1080HD. Where HD has a pixel ratio of 1920 x 1080, 4K has a pixel ratio of 3840 x 2160. With the numbers being exactly double of what today’s HD, you would that think that makes the screen to play it back in will have to be twice as many pixels, but it actually is four times the pixel count of HD. This will create much richer, accurate images for modest size screens and also the ability to have even larger screens with no pixelization of images.

The UHDTV standard supports both 3840 x 2160 (4K) and 7680 x 4320 (8K). The way the pixels are ordered is from left to right in each row, with rows ordered from top to bottom, and the pixel aspect ratio is 1:1 using square pixels. The standard includes progressive scan only and supports 120p, 60p, 59.94p, 50p, 30p, 29.97p, 25p, 24p, and 23.976p frame rates.

Everyone in the television industry from content creators to viewers is asking about 4K and what it is. The biggest concern is the forced obsolescence of HD cameras, monitors and televisions. Although the HD televisions aren’t in any means obsolete, 4K has certainly made us aware of HD being obsolete much sooner than we expected.

Many of the movie studios are shooting 4K now, but then they are transcoding down to 1080P HD. They are keeping the 4K files for archival purposes to re-release features at a later date. You will once again be able to buy a ™new∫ version of your favorite movie.

4K in the Editing Bay

Editors are also very affected by the emergence of 4K. The fact that the image size is going to multiply by four means any storage you currently use to store your video will be divided by at least four. Where you used to be able to store twenty hours of 1080P HD video, you will only be able to store five hours of 4K. There are also concerns about bandwidth of moving the video. It’s a concern that starts in the editing bay and ripples all the way down to the family TV room.

You will need to consider the following when taking on 4K. Can the processors in your editing system support such big video files? Do you have enough storage to support it? Does the path from your storage to your editing computer have enough bandwidth to move 4K? Does your editing software even support 4K? Do you have the means to transcode the video from 4K down to HD? Does your video IO hardware support 4K? Does your editing client/reference monitor support 4K? There really is a lot to consider before making the jump. Most manufacturers in the industry are supporting 4K now, but you will likely need to upgrade some components to shoot, edit and deliver it.

The file sizes of 4K can be downright huge. A full length feature film can take up to 10TB of storage of store. This does not include handles, unused footage or anything supplemental. This is great news for storage companies who feel threatened by the cloud.

4K in the home

Televisions, recently announced next generation home gaming systems, and most receivers are all supporting 4K now. But as of today, no one is really using it. The only place that takes 4K in a deliverable format is IMAX. Hollywood has yet to start releasing DVDs that are 4K. It is speculated that 4K DVDs will start hitting the market in 2014. As for broadcasting, there isn’t much going on in the United States right now. South Korea is currently the 4K leader, but Europe is currently broadcasting a channel in 4K as well. The U.S. will test a 4K broadcast this year at WNUV-TC in Baltimore (a Sinclair CW affiliate).

The biggest concern of getting 4K into the home is the United States does not have the infrastructure to do it well today. Google Fiber could correct this problem, but it’s not widely available yet. For now, any hope of 4K coming from the cable companies will be after the video is compressed down to the newly ratified H265 codec. The H265 codec (also known as HEVC ±High Efficiency Video Codec) is speculated to take the bandwidth required for 4K and will cut it in half. The other bonus of H265 is it promises to make better lossless compression of today’s HD formats. But even with these enhancements, home internet bandwidth is still currently lacking.

The speculation is that 4K will be hitting the Blu-Ray market first, and then trickle down to the other deliverable formats. Will this create a temporary re-emergence of the disk based delivery? Quite possibly. The video-phile and image purists will jump all over the 4K re-releases of films. But it could be some time before we see 4K hitting our cable boxes.

YouTube added support for 4K video in 2010 and they provided an outlet where you can download some test video and see the difference for yourself: http://www.4kdownload.com/howto/howto-download-4k-video

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

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

Spring time is fast upon us, as is the annual tradition of the mass exodus of post-production professionals to Las Vegas.  New England certainly has its share of representation on the show floor with local companies such as Avid, Boris, Facilis, EditShare, Aframe, and Axel Video. But one company with some great new offerings this year is GenArts out of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Since 1996 GenArts has been doing some of the best video plugin effects in the industry.  Every time you watch a movie or television show, it is very likely that you have seen their effects.  GenArts plugins have been used in at least one Academy Award nominated film every year since 1996.  They have been used in films such as LORD OF THE RINGS, STAR WARS, THE AVENGERS, IRON MAN and the X-MEN series.  You have seen them on television on shows such as Fringe, Lost, and all of the various CSI shows.  You could argue that GenArts plugins have been on television for more hours than Regis Philbin.

GenArts is using NAB to unveil its latest offering, Sapphire 7.  Sapphire 7 is looking to be GenArts’ most robust offering yet.  Sapphire 7 has two tiered offerings.  One is Sapphire 7 for VFX Artists and the other is Sapphire 7 for Editors.  Sapphire 7 for VFX is native to Autodesk, Nuke and After Effects.  Conversely, Sapphire for Editors is great for Avid, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere and Sony Vegas.  Most of the tools are featured in both product offerings, but they are tailor-made for your compositing or editing software of choice.

Sapphire 7 for VFX Artists has some new effects that are exclusive to this release.  Some of them includeº

S_Beauty –  uses an edge preserving blur while sharpening colors.  It really adds a punch to human subjects and is excellent in adding vibrancy to skin tones, eyes and hair.  It also compensates for poor lighting on people.   You can also key the effect to have even greater control over the quality.

S_EdgeAwareBlur – allows you to blur your image while preserving edges on your subject.  It gives your video a nice subtle water color look.  It can help you with grain, or even stylize your effects with a nice washed out film look.

S_Sharpen –  has been revamped from the ground up.  It compensates for the over contrast look that you get with other Sharpening tools in the market.  There have been a myriad of new parameters added to the S_Sharpen for version 7.

S_LensFlare – Atmospheric noise, new animation options, and texture overlays have been added in Sapphire 7.  You can now add atmospheric noise, texture overlays, and flicker to your lens flares.   They have added a new feature in this plugin that allows you to design your own flares with the Sapphire Flare Designer.

S_Zap – This is Sapphire’s lightning effect.  They have added spline controls over individual bolts of lightning.  You can also animate lighting over a path giving you the ability to create your own custom lightning shapes and patterns.  You can literally create your own custom lightning!  They have also added a 3D perspective which also allows you to view your lightning in 3D space.  This effect is also the easiest way for an editor to re-create the light sabers from the Star Wars films as straightening out a bolt of lightning and changing its color is very easy to do.

On top of all this, they have also added a motion blur to a lot of the effects, added a ton of new transitions such as S_FilmRoll, S_CardEffect, S_FlutterCut. Sapphire 7 promises to have more improved render speeds as well.  More CPU processing can provide up to a 20% boost in render speeds.  A feature that is subtle yet powerful is the ability to move Sapphire settings across host platforms.  So no longer do you need to rely on making screengrabs or having to write down your settings.  You can now move your settings across platforms.  So you can create a Sapphire effect in your editing software of choice and then move it to any other editing software.

Sapphire 7 for Editors has added some effects as well.  First and foremost, the biggest thing Avid editors will notice is how much, much more of the effects will play in real time.  Sapphire 7 offers more green dot effects than ever before.  Green dot effects are the ones that perform in real time in Avid Media Composer.

They have added Pan and Zoom for Avid.  What this effect does that Avid’s Pan and Zoom does not do natively is the ability to rotate and spin in 3D space.  They have added vignette, drop shadow and motion blur native to the effect.  You no longer need to nest and stack those effects together.  It is also more intuitive to use than the Avid’s Pan and Zoom.   You drop the clip effect on the timeline as opposed to loading the image into effect onto a piece of filler.

Once you start using these plugins, only then will you realize how much you actually have seen them on television.  Most effects have templates that you will immediately recognize.  With over 250 effects and 2500 presets in the effects, they give you many effects without any manipulation of any parameters of the effects.  It gives editors a chance to really impress their clients without too much work.

Sapphire 7 should be here just in time for NAB, but GenArts offers a water-mark free 2 week trial of all their effects, but be warnedºyou will be hooked.  They truly are that good.   If you make the trip out to NAB, be sure to visit GenArts at booth SL4224 or visit them from the comfort of your home at www.GenArts.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.

Computer Generated Images (CGI) and digital special effects artists are pretty magical.  You can create new worlds, go back into the past, bring back the dead or even create people.  In a world where we have the magic of AVATAR, the majestic film POLAR EXPRESS, and Hologram Tupac, you can create people to be used in the world of film, games and even live performance.  Virtual actors and CGI are taking the entertainment world by storm.

But will digital actors take the jobs of live actors?  At least today, the answer is…it depends.  Looking at what digital actors have been most successful, it seems like the circumstances are most favorable when the digital character isn’t fully human, but has human characteristics.  Gollum from LORD OF THE RINGS, the apes from the recent PLANET OF THE APES, and the “Navi” from AVATAR are great examples.  All of these characters were created by motion capture.  This is good because it keeps the actors working, and gives the producers of films creative leeway to create larger than life characters.  Andy Serkis has made a great living portraying both Gollum from LORD OF THE RINGS and one of the apes from PLANET OF THE APES.  He is an actor whose performances are some of the most memorable in the past decade, but yet he is unrecognizable in public.  His performances were captured and used as only a skeletal basis of what these characters will become.

The flip-side to this is that sometimes digital actors lose the human element and can be a little bit creepy.  People watch films to escape and engulf themselves in another world.  This is hard to do when the character looks inhuman, but there is just something off about them.  The movements are too stiff, or the eyes look a little too vacant.  No matter what it is, you can sense it and it makes audiences uncomfortable.  Imagine if the loveable Sloth from the film, THE GOONIES was CGI.  Would that make the character more or less loveable?  There is something to be said about the essence of human that just has not been captured yet in CGI.  It is no coincidence that thus far, the most successful and popular virtual characters are the ones who aren’t fully human.

Today the people who compete the most with digital actors are extras and people looking to break into the business.  Look at a film like LAWRENCE OF ARABIA.  They had hundreds and hundreds of extras.  Now what is more cost efficient, gathering hundreds of extras on horseback and pay to create costumes for them all, or is it easier and more flexible to digitally create it in post?  With fewer extras, it makes it harder for actors to be seen and get jobs.  We have all seen clips where your favorite actor was in the background of some older film.  As the shift moves to GCI characters, those opportunities to appear in the background will start to dry up.

Stunt performers are also one of the hardest hit when it comes to lost jobs to digital actors.  Why put a person in harm’s way when you can just digitally create the stunt that you are attempting?  With GCI and digital effects, you can create a more fantastic stunt and alter any pixel of it and the best part is, everyone is safe in doing so.  The end result is a more fantastic, elaborate product because you can do so much more when you don’t have to be concerned about an actor’s safety.

Commercial actors are also competing with digital actors, but not in the same way.  In commercial work, you want
star-power and people of influence using your product.   So if you were selling a product, would you want the run-of-the-mill commercial where four college kids are drinking your soft drink while going to the beach?  Or would you want a commercial where you have John Lennon or someone historic who is instantly recognizable using your product?  Resurrecting the dead is another way that digital actors are competing real actors for jobs.

There are mediums where the job market is opening up for actors though.  The gaming industry has had a huge amount of openings for actors over the past few years.  The actors who do gaming have a unique skill set as the performance is usually captured with a green screen and hundreds of motion tracking dots stuck to you.  You also don’t have the benefit of interacting with another performer as those jobs are usually shot with one actor all alone. New England is a hot bed of gaming companies, and they are all going to need actors at some point.

The tipping point of where digital actors will start to truly alter the job market is when it becomes more affordable to create someone than to hire someone.  Why pay an actor an hourly rate when you can just create one virtually. Your virtual actor cannot get sick, you can change their features instantly, you avoid scheduling conflicts, they don’t get temperamental and they won’t pester the producer and director with script feedback.

A bulk of the “virtual” acting work is actually done via motion capture with real actors, so the reality is the work for real actors isn’t going away for the time being.  The time to worry is when it becomes more affordable for you to make a virtual actor as opposed to paying someone.  So for the time being, it looks like you may be sharing the screen with a virtual actor.

Steve McGrath is a Broadcast Sales Engineer for HB Communications.   He has worked with NBC, ABC, CBS, NESN, NECN, Fox, ESPN, Pentagon, USDA, Powderhouse and many others.  You can reach him at Steve.McGrath@HBCommunications.com.

Media asset management is happening more now than ever, but we are becoming less and less aware of its presence.  Take your cell phone camera for example.  When your cell phone takes a picture, there is a ton of supplemental info in your picture file.  There is the time/date stamp, but there is other info embedded as well.  Information such as GPS location.  Imagine looking at a picture of your great parents wedding day.   Not only did you not know that date, but you had no idea where that picture was taken.  Our great-grandchildren will be able to go the exact location on earth where we were married.   It’s pretty impressive when you think about it.  It’s the metadata in the picture file that enables us to use that information.

People will tell you that metadata is “data about data” but what does that really mean?  What that means is if you have a media file, you can add supplemental data to attach to that video clip to make it easier to search in the future.  This sounds intimidating to some people, but the reality you encounter this phenomenon every day of your life.  It comes to you in the form of YouTube.

If you were to search for “Charlie Brown Christmas” on YouTube, you may not remember what the name of the program, but you remember it was a Christmas program with a dog named “Snoopy” in it.  So you visit YouTube you search or “Christmas” and “Snoopy” and sure enough, you will be brought right to the link for “Charlie Brown Christmas.”  This is because whoever posted that video to YouTube also added the searchable info of “Snoopy”, who is Charlie Brown’s dog.

When post houses and newsrooms move into digital media asset management, it becomes a new culture in how media is managed.  You have the capability of having multiple departments access the same media.  This makes sense because if you have your whole facility using the same software for email, why not have them all on the same software for media asset management?

There are other considerations you should have when adding media to a digital asset management system.   First being the archive is only as good as the metadata being attached to it.   In the previous example, if the person who posted the video did not think to add any other searchable data such as the other characters names in Charlie Brown Christmas (such as Snoopy, Woodstock, Linus, Lucy, etc.), then it makes it more difficult for someone to find that clip in the future.  Especially because the whole point is to make these video files searchable for years and years to come.

The other major consideration should be how to manage the database that all these assets are creating.   It is crucial when you are using any digital media asset management system that you keep your actual database on raided storage.  This is important because you need to have the flexibility to have a hard drive fail.  If you keep your asset manager’s database on non-protected storage you run the risk of losing the entire database should you have a hard drive failure.  Most manufacturers will insist that the database for their software is stored outside of the operating system on some raided networked storage.

The last consideration is future proofing.  If you invest in a digital asset management system, you need to ensure that its database is in an open enough format so that if the company you first invest in disappears for some reason, you can choose a new company that can support your already existing database.   If the database is compatible with Oracle or MySQL, you are in a good spot.

There are a ton of great products on the market that handle the management of video assets.  Take Avid Interplay for example.  You will find Interplay in most news rooms and major post houses in New England.  What Interplay does is it allows its users to index their media assets from inside and outside of video editing systems.   This can also be done within Avid’s flagship Media Composer editing software.  Users can have all their assets in their editing bins to be automatically checked in.  What Interplay also allows you to do is index your media from outside of Media Composer as well.   Using Interplay Access, a Photoshop artist can check in their work into Interplay to have it searchable for the video editing staff.   So not only are these asset management systems indexing your video assets, but they have the capability of indexing all of your assets.  You need the web team to find a graphic?  Marketing needs a logo for an upcoming tradeshow?  Legal needs a company logo for a letterhead?  Your media asset management system can bring it all together for all departments in your organization.

A more affordable alternative to Avid’s Interplay is Cat DV.  Cat DV is found in more ad agencies, smaller post houses and news rooms.   What makes Cat DV such a great product is the system requirements are more lenient than an Avid Interplay.  Cat DV can run as a server on most Macs and PCs.

Many of these asset management systems worked with applications, but more and more of them are moving toward a web-browser-based user interface.  This is a powerful paradigm shift because people used to have to buy expensive licenses per seat of anyone who was to see the database.  Now, with more and more companies moving toward a web browser based tool, this means that anyone on the same network as the media asset management system can browse, add and update assets in the database.

Wonder if this is for you?  Well Cat DV offers a free trial.  Try using it and seeing how it helps your day to day post work.  You can visit them at www.squarebox.com.

Steve McGrath is a Broadcast Sales Engineer for HB Communications.   He has worked with NBC, ABC, CBS, NESN, NECN, Fox, ESPN, Reuters, Pentagon, USDA, Powderhouse and many others.  You may reach him

NewFangled, Technical and Timely

By Steve McGrath

Hi Macaela, thanks for having me by. Can you tell me about what Newfangled does and how did you get started?

Thanks for coming by In short, Newfangled creates branded videos that people want to watch. We provide a script to screen solution for agencies and marketing departments who need to tell a branded story in a stylish and cost effective way.

We started about 5 years ago – I had been a producer/editor for some time, and I noticed an opportunity in the Boston industry. An agency had to hit up 2 or 3 Boylston Street vendors to get a video that was really high end. It was bad for budgets, made the agency’s job more difficult…and just didn’t make sense to me. With today’s technology, why couldn’t one company create a high-end video from concept to completion? And so, Newfangled was born.

I rented a small office and hired one person, then got a bigger office, and hired three more. Today we have a big, industrial loft in Charlestown with 10 employees and we’re servicing some of the best agencies & biggest brands in Boston. We’re doing it all – from high-end shoot/edit jobs, to 3D and 2D animation. It’s a very exciting time for Newfangled.

What are some of the challenges that you encounter being a woman in this industry?

I think as a woman, people automatically assume you aren’t tech-savvy and you don’t want to get your hands dirty. The guys feel bad or impolite letting you carry heavy things. It’s rude for them to let you set up a light. If you’re struggling to learn a piece of software or to select the right lens, they’ll offer to do it for you. They don’t mean to be offensive; they are just trying to be gentlemen. That starts in film school, and so women are automatically at a disadvantage because they are discouraged from learning the nitty-gritty from day one.

Women are naturally nurturing and organized. They can easily get pushed into producing when perhaps they really wanted to be a DP, or an editor. You have to push harder to be what you really want to be as a woman. And if you want to produce, go for it – because women do make awesome producers.

Conversely, as a woman, what are some things that you feel you have an edge on over your male counterparts?

I don’t get hung up on gender, I think that people as individuals have certain strengths and weaknesses and it’s really not related to your sex.

Where do you feel the best opportunities are for women in this industry and where have you seen growth?

Someone once told me “good things come to good people who work hard.” It doesn’t matter if you are male or female – if you work hard to be a better storyteller every day, you’ll see new opportunities all the time. Don’t focus on being a woman; focus hard on your craft. If you want to be an editor, be the best damn editor you can be and don’t let anyone stand in your way. The growth and opportunity will follow.

What do you love about this industry?

It’s just a passionate industry. You can’t break in without working your butt off, so once you are here – you know everyone else paid his or her dues as well. I love going to work every day. Do I love working most weekends and nights…maybe not so much! But it’s a small price to pay for doing what you love. It often doesn’t feel like work at all. I think that is a sentiment you would hear from most people in the industry. We’re a very lucky bunch.

If you could go back in time and give yourself some wisdom that would have helped you what would it be?

When I started out 10 years ago, I didn’t realize that my most valuable asset would ultimately be my support network. Make real friendships and connections with other people who enjoy filmmaking. This isn’t to say to schmooze with everyone you meet – no one likes a salesperson. Take inspiration from other people’s work. Put a smile on your face even when you’re doing revisions at 3am. Be genuinely curious and ask questions. Give credit where credit is due. Your intern today might be your client 5 years from now.

Does Newfangled allow you to travel? How does the travel treat you? What makes New England unique?

We’re telling real life stories through a branded lens – so we go where the action is. In the past year, we’ve been to Tokyo, San Fran, London, Miami, Seattle…the list goes on. My wife, Jenna, is the Executive Producer of most of Newfangled’s projects, so for us traveling is awesome because we get to go together. We try to stay and extra day or two in the more interesting places to sightsee.

When the location is left to us, we usually choose New England. It’s beautiful, we have access to beaches, mountain ranges and historic cities all within a 100-mile radius. It’s something you can’t find most other places in the country. Plus, the people here are great and there is a ton of talent to pull from.

What new and exciting things is Newfangled up to?

We’re still young, so everything is exciting. We’ve been working on accounts like Staples, Advance Auto Parts, Lenscrafters, Dunkins…. We feel so lucky to be a part of these epic brands.

But at the end of the day, what every artist wants is a project of their own, so Newfangled has also come together as a creative engine for our own feature length documentary, Sky High. It’s the true story of Jarrett Martin, a badass skydiver and BASE jumper who can’t be stopped even by a crippling injury. We have access to incredible footage, including his first jump at 9 years old and the ground launching accident that made him a paraplegic. We followed him as he picked rebuilt his life, and even returned to BASE jumping and competing as the only paraplegic in history at the USPA Nation Skydiving Competition.

The film is completely funded by Newfangled, and a $5K donation from our friends on Kickstarter. We’ve gotten the support of amazing artists like Cloud Cult, AWOL Nation, Thievery Corporation for the soundtrack, as well as a lot of local bands and musicians. We’re at rough-cut version 1Million- we’re our own worst critics! But, the people we’ve met along the way inspire us to keep on going, and we expect to be ready for release in early 2013.

With this being the Tech Edge portion of Imagine, how about talking workflow with the readers…how are you acquiring, editing and delivering?

These days, we’re typically shooting on our Canon C300. The camera is just so versatile and the picture is beautiful. It’s small enough to travel with, but can be completely built out for larger commercial shoots. Plus, it shoots at 50MB per second so there’s no need for a bulky external recorder or to wait for huge RED raw files to transcode like we had to do in the past.

In post, we transcode to Pro-res through FCP 7, and put everything onto our fiber server, Facilis Terrablock, which was built out by HB Communications. It’s awesome because all the editors and animators can access the same files as once, and the producers can connect via Ethernet from a laptop. It wasn’t cheap, but the investment paid off because it saves so much time.

We’re all mac, and our graphics are designed and animated within the Adobe suite & Cinema 4D. For editorial, you’ll notice we’re still on FCP7. FCPX just didn’t feel professional, Avid felt clunky, and we did try out Premiere for a few months, but again it was just clunky and unreliable. We’re really hoping Apple comes to its senses on this one!

Collaboration is easy because not only are we all internally connected via the fiber server, we have comfortable edit and animation suites where clients and producers can sit together and create. This is where the real magic happens. The other option is collaboration via our online portal. Clients can make time code- specific notes right on the video, and it works on anything – laptop, iPhone, iPad, and Droid. Everyone gets access to the notes in real time, and when the video is done, it’s one click to download any format you can imagine. At the end, everything goes onto LTO-5 archival tape, so we can wake up the project 20 years from now and know the assets are protected.

Macaela, if anyone wants to reach Newfangled, how do they do so?

We have a website at Newfangledstudios.com.

Thank you again for having me by.

Thank you, Steve
All of our info is on the site.

This month for Tech Edge, we are going to have a conversation with Kevin Scanlon.  Kevin is the Digital Asset Manager for CBS at WBZ –TV channel 4 in Boston and myTV38 (WSBK-TV).  As their Digital Asset Manager, Kevin performs a wide-range of duties including media management, troubleshooting, and workflow design from ingest, edit, and play-out of on-air news and commercial media; both within the WBZ facility as well as for the photographers and journalists in the field. His regular duties branch into multiple areas of WBZ-TV including the newsroom, promotions, graphics, and web departments. He is also very active in researching, testing and implementing new technologies in effort to streamline efficiencies and quality control of post-production.

Kevin Scanlon is a native of Massachusetts.  He went to Fitchburg State University where he obtained his B.S. in Communications concentrating in Film, Video and Multiple Media. Before moving to WBZ-TV he worked at Avid Technology. Since at WBZ, Kevin has simplified the WBZ post production process as they moved from a tape environment to a file-based 128TB network storage asset management system. WBZ also has a 300TB digital LTO archive library. He also managed WBZ through multiple format changes such as transitions in shooting, editing and play-out for SD 4:3 to SD 16:9 and HD.

I was able to sit down with Kevin at the WBZ studios and ask him some questions about shared storage and how it affects the workflow of the daily news.

Steve McGrath (SM):   WBZ uses shared storage to share video assets with editors.  How does that shared storage change the way you work?

Kevin Scanlon (KS):  Shared storage has completely changed the game for us. For the first time it made media available to everyone at the same time. Until then, in a tape world someone would have to wait until others were done with that tape footage or have a dub made in real time of said footage just to view and log, let alone start to edit material. The days of folks running down the hallway of a newsroom with tape in their hands to make air on time is becoming a thing of the past.

SM:  Do you feel a news station could operate in this day and age without shared storage?

KS:  I can’t see any other way to do business now. Based on how much storage you have, consider the possibility of the amount of footage everyone around the newsroom has available to them at any given moment. Not to mention in a fast-paced world we live in these days, if you want to stay competitive in the game and have the means to get that story out there quickly.   Having a networked shared storage system is what really makes that possible.

Viewers probably don’t realize how close things just barely make it to air sometimes. Especially now when you consider rather than running a tape down the hall to play-out to be cued up in time for air, you now have a little more time to make those last minute editing changes to polish your story. This is possible because and editor now can just click on a finished sequence in their editing system to send it to a playback server which is delivered within seconds. From there your finished piece is wrapped up for you by the computer and sent to the video play-out server, which sometimes makes it to the server within moments of a technical director hitting that play command. All the while the editor can move right onto there next story to do that process again and again. It definitely allows us to push the limits of time even further, but that’s what makes this business exciting.

SM:  When your photographers shoot video out in the field, how do you then get it onto your shared storage?

KS: We have photographers who both shoot and edit material out in the field using a laptop editing system.  Traditionally, we use microwave or satellite to play out that material in real-time to receive it back here at the station which is then turned around by and editor to send to the play-out servers and make air. We have, however, over the last few years been experimenting around either on our own or through other vendors to deliver media over the internet. Whether hard-wired, WiFi or 3G/4G air cards we have tried a bit of everything. We’ve done so either sending back raw footage, edited packages or even in several cases doing live shots and sending that media in real-time over cell phone signals to play out to live air.

This kind of technology has allowed us to be mobile in places like last year’s tornadoes in western Massachusetts. When roads are covered to too much with debris to get a microwave or sat truck through, the mobility of these future technologies allow us to get to the places and broadcast it live like never before.

SM:  Is shared storage available to more than just editors to access the same clips? And how are those other folks using the media?

KS: Everyone from producers, editors, reporters, to the promotions department is  using the shared storage and can all be working on the same media at once.  An ENG recording operator will use a software viewer/logging tool to confirm incoming feeds are recording and checking into our network storage with proper color and audio levels, in addition to adding metadata information about the feed.  Metadata such as “good take”, “bad take”, “standup” or “’tease”, so others can navigate to the necessary portions of a clip they need faster.  Meanwhile, in the newsroom, a reporter can start to view and log media to write their stories.   This is done while the promotions department editor is taking B-Roll and sound bites to cut into the show’s opening segment or commercials to run before the show airs.  While a newsroom editor is waiting for the stories to be written, they can start to comb through footage to sub clip out good b-roll shots, sound bites, or import graphics needed for the edited package to start to put together a rough cut.  And even while all that is going on, producers will be cutting together teases for that same story that will run before commercial breaks during the news show.  On top of all that, the executive producer or news director can call up finished pieces to review and approve before airing.  This entire process happens simultaneously from each person’s individual computer around the newsroom.   The real time collaboration you get with shared storage allows all this to happen simultaneously.

SM:  Once a news broadcast has aired, do you keep the clips on the storage or are they archived?

KS: Our media these days is all archived through a robotic digital LTO archive tape library.  The daunting task is taking over 400 hours of recorded online media and deciding what to keep short term, what to delete, and what to archive for long term use.  Generally, we keep new media captured into the network storage online for about two weeks. From there, we melt and consolidate down the edited portions of our broadcast to keep just what was used.  Larger high profile ongoing stories or investigative reports we will keep more of that raw media to have for a later dates when that story comes up  in the news again.  Also, historical footage such as weather or political events we log and archive for long term use as well.

SM: Do you have a way of finding clips on your shared storage that you have already used?  For example, if you are doing a sports story and you want to recap how an athlete’s entire season is going?

KS:  Whenever dealing with as many file assets as we have in our system, a consistent naming convention is a key part of our workflow.  Things like a date stamp helps find a piece that was created last Tuesday.  But when over 300 stories could be created over the course of a day, most stations have a system of abbreviations such as “PKG” for package, “VO” for voice over and so on. These are so anyone could search for certain key words to help reduce the amount of results they find when performing a search for a particular story. Every story we air also has what’s called a video ID, which like date stamp on your file asset provides another uniquely coded number attached to its metadata to provide an individual identifier to search and find your story quickly.

You also asked about sports which for us is necessary, as I’m sure for other stations as well to keep very well organized.  Beyond naming conventions, we use a simple system of organizing virtual folders on our asset management system.

Most of our sports folders are broken down into sports leagues such as NBA, MLB, etc.  From there, we have folders of each of our major teams which are broken down into dated folders for a season, and then dated folders for each game. That game folder will consist of highlight reels that someone will cut together for each game of the season.  Within this, the editor/producer will add in metadata about the game such as goals scored or big plays for certain players.  All of metadata carries with the asset all the way through to archive.

We will also create player profile pieces highlighting practice or game footage of said players to have available whenever they may come up in the news due to injury or scandal.  That way, when a player is mentioned during a press conference, we have some footage to quickly cut together and send to play out and use as B-Roll video to switch to during that press conference.  When you are working in any newsroom that cuts together tens of thousands of stories over the course of a year without any means of organization and or naming convention, your entire workflow can come to a grinding halt all because someone cannot find that one piece of iconic video that we shot early in the year.  Even then, video can still be hard to find, so it’s an issue we are constantly trying to modify and improve upon.

SM:  Kevin, thank you for your time and having me by the station.

KS:  Anytime, Steve.

Steve McGrath is a Broadcast Sales Engineer for HB Communications.   He has worked with NBC, ABC, CBS, NESN, NECN, Fox, 
Versus, ESPN, Reuters, Pentagon, USDA, Powderhouse and many others.  You can reach him at Steve.McGrath@HBCommunications.com