The Ultimate Solution For Corporate Video Production

“Hey, do you have that video editing project that’s due today for Human Resources open? Something weird just happened to the project on my computer. You didn’t just save it, did you? ” I glanced over at my lead video editor with some concern.

“Uhh, yeah, I was working on that interview sequence,” he replied. “Didn’t you want me to work on that?”

We stared at each other for a second, understanding what just happened and the mess we had created for ourselves.

“Not again,” I sighed, opening a previous auto-save of the project. “Whatever you do, please DO NOT save that project file now,” I pleaded to my colleague as I appealed to the media gods in hopes that my hours of meticulous editing work wasn’t done in vain… again.

This is how our journey to a better workflow began—a better workflow that we found with EVO.

Growing Demand For Corporate Video

Working in corporate video production at a large, multinational, Fortune 500 company, leadership realized how valuable an internal video team was. In just a few years, we grew from a single employee post-production department to a full-blown marketing video production team with 16 video editors, producers, and other collaborators, plus a half-dozen departments knocking on our door for new video content every day.

The way we were organizing our assets was becoming dangerously unreliable. MP4s, JPGs, PNGs, and other media were spread across multiple computers, random network shares, external hard drives, and memory sticks. It was a challenge to organize and secure all the media we had developed, like confidential quarterly data, social media content, HR documents, voiceovers, video clips, and deliverables.

Our USB shared storage workflow couldn’t keep up with the pace of our video projects. Endless complications forced us to make mistakes when it came to versioning and permissions on who could edit what and when. Those mistakes took time to correct; time we simply didn’t have.

My team scheduled daily meetings to determine who can edit what and when—a cumbersome process just to ensure we weren’t overlapping in-progress work. This tedious song and dance went on for months. Soon, it became impossible to juggle all of our assets using the “system” we created.

There’s got to be a better way.

Finding Our Solution

In April 2016, I attended the NAB Show in Las Vegas. I wanted to find a solution to our media management issues, so I went hunting for a fix on the tradeshow floor.

I remember the words on their banner caught my eye before anything else: Studio Network Solutions. We had a studio. We were having a problem with organizing and sharing our data over the network. We were looking for a storage solution. Let’s see what this product is all about.

That’s where I found the remedy for our media management troubles: EVO, a hardware and software solution made for media teams. A three-letter product that can resolve our three-letter file storage issues—MOVs, AIFs, PDFs, and all the other acronyms could finally be shared among our users intelligently with EVO!

Secure Media Storage

Everyone on the video marketing team knew that security is Rule Number One. Nothing moved forward without the Network Security team’s buy-in, no matter how much we tried. My first questions for the SNS team were all about meeting our strict network security standards.

SNS provided a security-specific white paper for our IT team, and Network Security authorized the purchase the very next day. Getting Network Security approval at all—let alone in a day— was no small feat, but EVO met all of the stringent data security protocols they required and then some.

Even after security approvals, it can be a challenge to execute large purchase orders in a corporate environment. We were grateful that SNS supported the process from beginning to end. They worked with Accounts Payable and IT to get our secure media storage system ordered and delivered, and they even provided the services to assist us with getting the EVO racked up and running.

Our marketing video team was not the most tech-savvy when it came to network technology, so we were relieved that someone was there to walk us through the process. Between the on-site and online support, SNS was there for whatever we needed during the installation and beyond.

EVO 8 Bay shared storage server

Corporate Video Production Life With EVO

We installed two EVO 8 Bay shared storage servers for the marketing video production department: one for media and projects, and one for archiving completed projects.

I can say with 100% certainty that our video production workflow was faster and more efficient with EVO. Because of that new-found efficiency, we could increase the quantity of work we produced, which led to more projects and media that we needed to store, and a bigger archive to manage. Having a dedicated EVO for archived media was crucial for our team, and a huge improvement from the slow, 4TB USB external drive we were used to.

Using EVO was a breeze. It just kind of dissolved into the background of our team’s production workflow. It required no maintenance, and I can say that with the help of our UPS, we never lost access to the EVO—not even once, since 2016. It was the most reliable piece of equipment we used, and we used it daily.

I know first-hand how EVO and the EVO suite of included software helped my video team’s workflow. I know the limitations we had and how quickly they disappeared once we got EVO. And now, as the newest member of the SNS team, I get to help thousands of creative teams break down those same barriers in their workflow.

Corporate video production life pre-EVO was often messy with numerous external media shared hastily among my creative team. Hopefully, if you’re in a similar situation to what I was in, you too can look to EVO to simplify your workflow, secure your assets, and greatly improve your team’s ability to collaborate on media projects.

To learn more about EVO shared storage servers and the problems they solve for marketing and corporate post-production teams around the world, schedule a live demo today.

Gigcasters Achieves Broadcast Quality Live Streaming with the Zixi OnAir Mobile App

In the current climate where it has been difficult to bring a large staff contingent with a great deal of equipment to a production site, content providers are looking for ways to capture and deliver live streams with less gear and smaller teams. Surprisingly, many are finding that a solution to delivering broadcast-quality streams from remote locations can be found in their pocket.

Over the past year, mobile apps have become increasingly popular for live productions and events. With a large install base and high-quality video capture built into mobile devices, apps designed for streaming over IP networks provide a seamless way to quickly enable both experienced and novice production teams. Remote production techniques that rely on mobile applications for content capture and delivery allow content providers to produce content in a cost-effective manner and connect with their fan base at a time when attention is at an all-time high.

A SEAMLESS WAY TO ENABLE QUALITY MOBILE REMOTE PRODUCTION AT SCALE

Gigcasters, a live streaming engineering company, has seen mobile production increase during the pandemic and witnessed first-hand the benefits of higher frequency, lower cost productions using Zixi’s OnAir app infrastructure.

With the Zixi OnAir mobile app, users can stream live from an iOS or Android device, using the device’s built-in camera to encapsulate the encoded video and audio for transmission over standard Internet or cellular connections with the Zixi protocol, RTMP or RIST. The Zixi OnAir mobile app is ideal for live event producers and ENG workflows, allowing users to easily conduct real-time capture and delivery of breaking news stories, alternative views of concerts, sporting events, or other live events during a broadcast.

“Brands are looking for new ways to get their messaging out, so live streaming became very popular during the pandemic” says Casey Charvet, CEO of Gigcasters. “But it’s been tricky to get people on site with capacity restrictions and other protocols, so remote production has become very big. We started looking at ways to facilitate remote production in a very cost-effective manner.”

Using the Zixi OnAir app was a natural evolution for Gigcasters as they already relied on Zixi’s Software-Defined Video Platform (SDVP) for their live streaming software needs. The company first tried live video delivery remotely using laptops and WebRTC, but found the reliability of the feed was not good, and packet loss and image quality were insufficient. Once the Zixi OnAir app was quickly enabled on local production teams’ mobile phones, getting a broadcast-quality feed was easy.

“We started looking at ‘what is the easiest way that we can have somebody send us a feed?’” says Charvet. “Mobile streaming apps were the obvious choice. Mobile phones have a large install base, everybody has a phone, people are very familiar with how to operate and record video on a phone. There are tons of accessories like ring lights, stands and microphones packs that are made to work with phones. We’re able to leverage this massive install base and product familiarity along with exceptional video quality from the latest generation of phones with amazing cameras.”

As manufacturing companies continue to pack functionality and capabilities into their mobile device offerings, production quality will get even better. “The OnAir app gives us a way to easily enable IP streaming using a great protocol that fits into our existing IP base remote production workflow, in a way that’s easy for someone to pick up who isn’t necessarily a videographer, resulting in a broadcast quality, high bandwidth IP feed.”

With Zixi’s OnAir app, Gigcasters easily enables field production teams to capture live streams using their mobile devices and to easily send them to the company’s headquarters in Austin, TX, where the company performs video mixing and graphic production along with other editing.

OVERCOMING CHALLENGES OF REMOTE PRODUCTION WITH A RELIABLE, ADAPTABLE SOLUTION

While streaming out of residential, business or stadium locations can be challenging due to lack of dedicated fiber connections or subpar broadband connections that do not prioritize outgoing traffic, Gigcasters found that transmission with the Zixi protocol was flawless with Zixi’s proprietary Forward Error Correction and ARQ that make the Internet reliable for broadcast-quality delivery.

“One of the things we really like about the OnAir app is the ability to use LTE connection as well as wifi. Zixi OnAir allows you to use the bonding functionality between 4G LTE and wifi, so that when signal strength drops, the quality gets reduced gracefully without compromising the viewer experience. This autoscaling mechanism is unique.”

Zixi On-Air can bond cellular and Wi-Fi connections to send the highest bit rate possible, ensuring delivery of a high-quality stream even in degraded network conditions. This bonding capability of the Zixi protocol is valuable when connectivity at remote locations can fluctuate. When you’re running a single camera, single feed production, this ability to deliver a continuous, reliable, broadcast quality feed no matter the underlying IP network is essential.

UNTETHERED PRODUCTION EXPANDS BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES

The untethered production capability that mobile streaming apps provide allows for drastically increased opportunities to capture and distribute live content at greater frequency from both professional and prosumer sources with improved economics. The higher frequency, lower cost remote production has allowed Gigcasters to support even more events and scale capabilities in their core business to support this increase in volume.

“Before we were taking a finished program feed coming from a remote site and helping with the distribution of that stream”, explains Charvet. “In the remote production world, we are now taking in remote clean source feeds from the OnAir app, and producing, including opening title graphics, background music, lower third graphics, and providing that service remotely on equipment that’s running in the cloud or in our data center, and then distributing the finished program feed out to wherever the client wants it to go.”

LOOKING AHEAD: HOW WILL 5G CHANGE PRODUCTION?

As 5G networks increase across the globe, live streaming production from a 5G-enabled mobile device will become even more customary. Then one of the big challenges of broadcasting over 5G will be the need to sort through an increased amount of quality content feeds, including 4K, coming in at greater frequency with more data, and determining the best way to program them.

“With the potential to receive hundreds of feeds from one specific location, there are going to be huge possibilities and opportunities for businesses to leverage that” Says Charvet. “This is when a solution like Zixi’s OnAir app that’s 5G compliant and can service that production with technology that’s more powerful and reliable will be a game changer.”

Content Chain Trends report – Content Creation & Production

Our latest Content Chain Trends Report: Content Creation & Production discusses major macro business and tech trends as well as their implications on products and services in Create & Produce. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of cloud and pushed media businesses to invest more in remote production, while consolidating their crews. In this report, we also analyze the explosive growth of the “creator economy”, which offers new business opportunities for tech vendors, many of whom have already responded to the increasing need for smaller, lighter, cheaper and connected cameras – used by individual videomakers – by launching products to this new vertical.

Highlights:

  • The disrupted supply chain, driven by the global chip shortage, has led to price increases for key hardware components. Many suppliers were therefore forced to increase prices, sharing the financial pressure with their customers.
  • Major revenue drivers like sports events and studio productions made a comeback in 2021, boosting investment in original content and remote production.
  • Demand for content production equipment – being more reliant on software and cloud-based solutions – has recovered quickly, but not in every product category.
  • Content creation and production are greatly affected by the transition to DTC business models, changing tech demand in all sectors, particularly in live sports.
  • Collaboration remains a key investment driver for media companies.
  • The emergence of the “creator economy” provides interesting new business opportunities for media companies, leading to technology democratization.
  • In graphics and video production, media companies are investing in augmented reality, virtual studios, real-time motion graphics, and other features to boost interactivity.

View the interactive report below, or click here to view the pdf version.

In Conversation with G&L

In this IABM TV interview, Alexander Leschinsky (Co-Founder & Managing Director at G&L) discusses the technologies G&L use, and some of the challenges of working with the big broadcasters. Alexander also shares the challenges for the delivery of media in the future.

Supply Chain Disruption Poll Results

Between 2021 and 2022, a global shortage of hardware components hit various technology sectors, including media tech. In April 2021, we measured the impact of this shortage, finding that 85% of media tech suppliers had moderate or severe issues with sourcing hardware components. In February 2022, we reassessed the impact of this shortage on the media tech industry with another poll, whose results are presented in this report.

View the interactive report below or click here to download the PDF.

farmerswife Case Study: L’Immagine Ritrovata

The Challenge

We’ve been running for 30 years; the lab was founded in 1992. The business has changed a lot overtime, when the lab started the world of cinema was analog and nowadays cinema is digital. We went through the biggest revolution since the beginning of cinema.

Before using farmerswife, the size of the company was smaller and we worked using common tools like Google Drive, Excel and so on. We got a professional software when we purchased farmerswife.

The big challenge for us was that by using the tools that were mentioned, Excel or Google Drive, we found that we were more rigid when making decisions. These tools were not as dynamic as farmerswife, that you can just stream and change in a click.

The Solution

We were in touch with farmerswife for a long time, but we finally started using it in 2020. farmerswife is nice, it’s pretty logic and familiar and we liked it since the beginning. We evaluated different softwares, and farmerswife was the best compromise for us: not too complicated but very professional.

Until now, we only use farmerswife for production when planning the restoration of films. We use it to put all the technical steps of this process, from the repair until deliverables. farmerswife is a big help to organize our planning because per year we restore more than 200 titles and every restoration project has different steps, so you can imagine that we have big volumes of tasks to manage, monitor, adapt and so on.

The flexibility of the software is key for us. Thanks to farmerswife we can be more reactive and flexible. When we get a last-minute call or last-minute change, thanks to farmerswife we are able to adapt, and it has changed the speed of how we can react to the clients’ requests. It makes us save a lot of time and nerves!

We are based in Bologna, but we also have sites in Paris and in Hong Kong. The next step for us with farmerswife, will be to install and introduce farmerswife into our other venues to have everything in one planning system as there’s a lot of exchange between the cities. In Paris, it’s already purchased, and we just settled the training date.

The Support

It’s good and running. I was in copy with some issue that was fixed with no problem!

About: L’Immagine Ritrovata

https://www.immagineritrovata.it

L’Immagine Ritrovata is a highly specialised film restoration laboratory. It was born and developed thanks to the good work of the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna, with which the laboratory is in continual close collaboration.
Today, L’Immagine Ritrovata is an international point of reference in the field, due to its development of methodologies, its constant research work and the vast range of its activities in the restoration of world cinematographic heritage. The equipment with which the laboratory is furnished – facilities that include all workflows, from 4K to photochemical – is at the forefront of technological innovation and is designed for the restoration of film from every cinematic age.

In Conversation with NAGRA

Two part IABM TV interview with Tim Pearson (Vice President for Global Solutions Marketing, NAGRA)

Part one:
Tim discusses how the Pay-TV ecosystem is changing as direct-to-consumer and apps become dominant means of media consumptuion, and why understanding media consumption patterns is so important today.

Part two:
Tim talks about the impact of the pandemic on content piracy, and the business drivers for content security initiatives.

Avrotros chooses Octopus X

Octopus and Avrotros started their relationship several years ago when the Dutch broadcaster was searching for a new newsroom system for their news programs. At that time, the decision went in a different direction and Avrotros started to use an NRCS recommended by the Dutch Broadcasting Foundation (NOS). This solution, however, was not flexible enough to fit the purpose of all the teams at Avrotros and some programs had to continue searching for an alternative. The team at Radar explored various newsroom solutions on the market and found Octopus X to be the best fit for their demands.

Find out how Avrotros:

  • Carried out all stages of newsroom deployment remotely
  • Creates content using story-centric, topic-centric, or rundown-centric workflows
  • Publishes content to various social media and web channels
  • Carefully plans and researches content while fostering collaboration among team members
DOWNLOAD CASE STUDY

Content Chain Trends: Content Distribution & Monetization

Report highlights:

• Investment in Publish and Monetize recovered in 2022 after the decline in 2021, making Monetize and Consume the top investment areas in the BaM Content Chain.
• Changing viewing habits are forcing traditional media businesses to enter the OTT space, increasing its fragmentation and competitiveness.
• The generational shift in media consumption puts gaming and consumer interactivity at the center of the media ecosystem, improving user engagement and generating new revenue streams.
• The convergence of different sectors of the M&E industry, such as gaming, betting, social media, etc., is driving investment in technologies that are not media-specific – either by acquiring complementary tech businesses or by developing technology internally.

View the interactive report below, or click here to access the PDF.