Q&A: Sohonet — Connecting the Dots to Connect Storytellers (Sponsored)
Sohonet says its reason for being is connecting storytellers. And in fact, they’ve connected thousands of companies and over 100,000 creators working across the globe.
“We work alongside studios and post teams to build a range of tools that remove technical obstacles in their workflows, so nothing gets in the way of creating great content,”
Q&A: Puget Systems – If You Need It, They Will Build It (Sponsored)
Puget Systems, which builds custom computer systems and servers, focuses on creative workflows within M&E. By learning their customers’ workflows, they let the software being used determine the right hardware for their users’ work. The company then tests various hardware configurations to see precisely what works best to meet the stated needs. They say their goal is to make systems that allow users to stay in the creative flow without worrying about the hardware.
Outlook: Empowering Creatives – The Future of Creativity and Collaboration (Sponsored)
by Michael Kammes
A seasoned industry expert once explained the crucial distinction between efficiency and effectiveness, and it was a concept that initially eluded me. How could the most efficient approach not be the most effective? It became clear when I realized that efficiency is often defined by a single person or thought process,
Q&A: Powering Creativity — HP’s New Z8 Fury (Sponsored)
Creatives working in media and entertainment are constantly looking for more power and faster workflows. HP has spent years providing systems that meet those needs while working with the latest software that allows artists to just iterate without any distractions. That tradition continues with the introduction of the new Z8 Fury. “As we move into 2023,
Q&A: AJA Launches ColorBox to Deliver Color-Managed Workflows – Sponsored
Over the past few years, color management for features, episodics and live events has become more complex. Advancements in digital cinematography have delivered amazing developments in dynamic range and image fidelity but have also introduced more complexity to color pipelines. On-set color management now plays a huge part, ensuring a consistent look from capture to distribution,
Q&A: Telestream – Automating Ingest and Delivery with ContentAgent – Sponsored
ContentAgent, which was purchased by Telestream about a year and a half ago, is known for managing and automating file-based workflows and making core ingest and delivery operations accessible to nontechnical staff. It was launched in 2004 by industry pros working in Soho, London’s media hub. Since its inception, it has become a globally deployed,
Q&A: LED Workflows Targeting Virtual Production from Brompton Technology – Sponsored
Brompton Technology, which makes video processing products for the live event, film and broadcast industries and focuses on LED workflows that target virtual production —including those used by Disney’s The Mandalorian —was born 10 years ago. It started as a spinoff from Carallon, specialists in control systems for the live entertainment industry.
“It was a time of disruption for LED video walls in live events,” says Brompton CEO Richard Mead.
Q&A: Meet Autodesk’s Diana Colella and the New Maya Creative – Sponsored
Diana Colella is SVP of Media and Entertainment at Autodesk. She heads up strategy and execution for some of the most used Autodesk products, such as Maya, 3ds Max, Arnold, Flame and ShotGrid. During her 25-year tenure at Autodesk, she has gained diverse perspective and experience working with teams across the company, including operations, product management,
Q&A: MediaSilo Brings Order to the Chaos of M&E Media Management – Sponsored
If you’ve been working in this industry for any length of time, you will likely recognize the name MediaSilo, a company that created a streamlined and modern video sharing process for those working in media and entertainment. When MediaSilo merged with Wiredrive in 2018, the company name changed to Shift Media, and the product name was eventually changed to Shift as well to recognize “the shift in mentality”
Q&A: Light Iron Delivers From Set to Post – Sponsored
In 2009, when Light Iron opened in Hollywood it was a pioneer of sorts, offering mobile dailies, archival services, offline editorial rental, digital intermediate/finishing and delivery — things that are ordinary today but weren’t back then. Light Iron has evolved its rich history since then, always developing new ways to iterate with technology and creativity.
Q&A: Sound Particles’ Immersive Audio Software — Complex Sounds Quickly and Easily – Sponsored
Sound Particles makes 3D CGI-like audio software — imagine Maya but for sound. Cool right? So how on Earth did Sound Particles CEO Nuno Fonseca, Ph.D., come up with the idea? “It all started almost 15 years ago when I realized the most interesting visual effects I was seeing in movies used particle systems, a computer graphics technique that creates thousands of points to simulate fire,
Q&A: Assimilate’s Streamlined Virtual Production Toolset – Sponsored
For years, Assimilate has been offering its Scratch color grading and finishing software, but the company hasn’t stopped there. When a new way of working takes hold in media and entertainment, Assimilate has been able to build onto its core technologies to service stereo 3D, HDR, virtual and augmented reality and now virtual production. Virtual production workflows have taken off over the last couple of years,
Q&A: Cinnafilm’s PixelStrings Delivers On-Prem and in the Cloud – Sponsored
Cinnafilm, which has been an industry fixture for more than a decade, has always been interested in finding ways to make pictures look better at a reasonable price. And when they launched PixelStrings in 2018, they took a big step forward in that direction. The PixelStrings platform encompasses all of Cinnafilm’s media conversion,
Q&A: Moxion Founder on Joining the Autodesk Family – Sponsored
Industry pros are always looking for more efficient and secure workflows, from set to post. Moxion, which was recently acquired by Autodesk, does just that. The software provides secure digital dailies workflows and enables pros to collaborate and review camera footage both on-set and remotely, allowing for creative decisions to be made during principal photography.
Q&A: Autodesk’s New Cloud Pipeline Tool, More With Jeff Bell – Sponsored
Jeff Bell has been on both sides of the visual effects world, working as part of product development teams and as a user creating content out of his Toronto-based Tangent Animation. While working on film and television projects, Bell and team found some areas of the pipeline that could be done faster and more efficiently,
Q&A: A Hybrid Approach to Public Cloud and On-Prem for Dell – Sponsored
Many companies that have adopted cloud have experienced sticker shock due to the public cloud services they consume over the long term. “In some cases, the cost is many times what they were expecting and a much higher cost than comparable on-prem deployments,” notes Dell Technologies’ Tom Burns. “That being said, cloud is excellent for specific parts of media workflows.” Dell Technologies — from a storage,
Q&A: Virtualizing a New Way of Working With WrkFlo.solutions – Sponsored
If the pandemic has shown us anything, it’s that work can get done anywhere if post pros have access to their tools, secure data and fast machines. Established in late 2020, WrkFlo.solutions targets a hybrid world that combines working from home with on-site and remote-forever artists and producers using virtualization — cloud-based, remote,
Q&A: Telestream on PRISM Waveform Monitor Solutions for Post – Sponsored
This summer marks the second anniversary of Telestream acquiring the Tektronix video test and synchronization business. For years, Tektronix was known as the “Xerox” or “Band-Aid” of waveform monitoring; that’s how well-known and well-used those products are. Knowing how important this technology is to those working in pro video, Telestream quickly integrated the PRISM Waveform Monitor platform with the Inspect 2110 solution for monitoring multiple 2110 streams “by exception,” introducing six new PRISM models in early 2021.
Q&A: AJA Talks T-TAP Pro for Remote 4K/HDR Workflows, the Road Ahead – Sponsored
AJA Video Systems recently released the next generation of its T-TAP video output device. And there has never been a more appropriate time for a tool like this one, as it targets remote 4K and HDR workflows. T-TAP Pro is a compact, silent and portable Thunderbolt 3-connected device that simplifies 4K/Ultra HD and 2K/HD/SD monitoring and output over 12G-SDI and HDMI 2.0 — including HDR support — from compatible Mac or PC computers.
Dell Partner Series – Powering Creativity with Adobe, Maxon, Nvidia (Video) – Sponsored
Collaboration — cooperation — partnership. In an ever more complicated world, where would we be without them? As pipelines grow more complex, deliverables multiply and remote workflows proliferate — the importance of partnerships has never been so vital.
For years, Dell has been building partnerships with many of the key players in our industry,
Q&A – Object Matrix Delivers Storage Options Exclusively to the M&E Sector – Sponsored
Founded almost 20 years ago by three pioneers of object storage, Object Matrix was designed from the ground up to handle the tsunami of data that companies needed to do business in the modern age. In addition to storing that data, they created products to protect, process, find, share and distribute the information that data held.
Q&A – Italy’s Mnemonica Offers User-Designed Platform to Screen, Deliver and Store – Sponsored
Mnemonica is a startup from Italy that has its roots in M&E. This cloud-based SaaS platform is dedicated primarily to producers and post pros, offering a remote screening room option and a digital delivery service in one bundle, with a notably easy-to-use interface. With many in Europe using the platform, the company has now turned its attention to North America.
Q&A: Audionamix Talks AI for Audio Separation, Professional Services – Sponsored
If you’ve ever worked with older titles where multitrack sessions and stems were missing or never existed, you’ve experienced less-than-ideal audio, noise and frustration. Solving this particular problem has been Audionamix’s bread and butter since 2003. Started in Paris, this research-focused source separation technology company was initially tasked with helping remove songs from a full mix of a TV show or movie.
Q&A: Quantum on NVMe for M&E and the road ahead – Sponsored
Quantum has had a busy year. They acquired Western Digital’s ActiveScale object storage product line, launched their more affordable F1000 NVMe product targeting smaller post houses, and reorganized their engineering division. All of which means, CEO Jamie Lerner has been a very busy man.
What’s happening in the world right now is unprecedented.
Q&A – AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3: Creativity at the speed of thought – Sponsored
When AMD made its 64-core Ryzen Threadripper 3 available in February, the company doubled the amount of cores and threads from the CPU’s previous iteration. This latest version gives users the ability to edit 8K in real time and significantly speeds up visual effects and rendering workflows. We spoke to James Knight, AMD’s visual effects and M&E director,
Q&A: Endcrawl Changes the Endgame for End Credits – Sponsored
Endcrawl, a dedicated SaaS platform for managing and rendering film and television credits, allows users to quickly and easily create and update end credits. Endcrawl’s founders are John Eremic — known in the industry as “Pliny” — and Alan Grow. Pliny’s background is post, so it’s no surprise that a product like this would grow from his experience.
Q&A: Boris FX Talks Growth and the Road Ahead – Sponsored
Back in the early days of nonlinear editing, Boris Yamnitsky worked as an engineer at Media 100, which was paving the path that leads to today, along with companies like Avid Technology. At the time, these new tools took editing out of the corporate broadcast environment and large post facilities and empowered individual users to edit and finish video projects in their homes and small offices.
Q&A: MSI is Expanding Gaming Expertise to High-End Content Creation – Sponsored
Back in 1986, MSI’s founders — Joseph Hsu, Henry Lu, Jeans Huang, Frank Lin and Kenny Yu — shared a vision of bringing high-performance hardware to users. They targeted the gaming and esports industry before moving into the gaming laptop market and, most recently, media and entertainment. Early on, the founders realized that in order to provide the right tools,
creative.space Q&A: Growing an On-Premises Managed Storage Solution – Sponsored
creative.space is on-premise, managed storage designed to provide creatives the performance they need without the technical burden of maintaining large lT systems. It was created by post pros for post pros, so it recognizes that M&E companies have unique needs.
To find out more, we reached out to Tim Anderson, CEO and CTO of creative.space and parent company DigitalGlue,
Q&A: Enabling Streamlined Workflows with Imagine Products – Sponsored
If you have worked in this business for any amount of time, you are likely familiar with Imagine Products, which has been creating software to help streamline workflows for almost 30 years. Their offerings include the heavily used offloading tool ShotPut Pro, in addition to PreRoll Post, myLTO and PrimeTranscoder.
To stay successful in this business for as long as Imagine Products has,
PNY Q&A: Quadro RTX for Realtime Ray Tracing and More – Sponsored
PNY, an authorized NVIDIA Quadro partner, is helping to bring new tools to artists working in graphics and animation. One of the newest updates in technology is NVIDIA’s Quadro RTX line of graphics boards, which offers a fusion of realtime ray tracing, deep learning and advanced shading. We recently reached out to PNY’s Carl Flygare to find out more about the technology and how creatives can benefit.
Q&A: DigitalGlue — Partnering with Clients From Shoot to Screen – Sponsored
DigitalGlue has been supporting the industry since 2002. As a systems integrator, the company makes sure to ask the right questions of clients in order to determine what is right for their particular workflows. When they felt the industry could benefit from a different type of storage model, they set out to develop a new solution.
Q&A: BOXX Focusing on Post and All That Surrounds It – Sponsored
Workstations for VFX, VR, AI and the Future
With over 20 years of experience in the media and entertainment market, BOXX has a long history with the post production community. Their APEXX workstation line is the latest offering designed to support today’s complex workflows. We reached out to BOXX’s John Vondrak to find out more about the company and his take on workstation configurations for visual effects,
Q&A: PNY’s New Mobile Workstation – Sponsored
PNY has been supporting the media and entertainment industry for years with NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics solutions. Last year they strayed just a bit from their typical offerings and created PREVAILPRO, a thin, lightweight and powerful workstation targeting our industry. We reached out to Carl Flygare, PNY’s Quadro product marketing manager, to find out more about these new mobile systems.
Panasas Q&A: Storage for Data-Intensive Jobs – Sponsored
Panasas ActiveStor Scale-Out NAS fpr Post, VFX, VR, AI and More
Panasas has been engaging with the media and entertainment market in recent years, studying workflows and partnering with companies to better understand their needs. Their ActiveStor scalable NAS is designed for data-intensive jobs, including those in post, visual effects,
Q&A: Cinnafilm Eyes the End-Game – Sponsored
PixelStrings — Conversions for All Formats, Frame Rates via the Cloud
Cinnafilm, which has been an industry fixture for close to a decade, has always been interested in finding ways to make pictures look better at a reasonable price. Their latest product doesn’t veer from that goal — PixelStrings combines Cinnafilm’s image processing technology with cloud computing and storage,
Blackmagic Q&A: Edit, Sound and Color in Resolve 14 – Sponsored
Over the last few years, Blackmagic Design has been adding more and more nonlinear editing tools to its color grading software DaVinci Resolve. The company’s most recent update offers all of its color grading goodness, plus collaborative workflows and Fairlight professional audio tools within the software. A lot of pros have questions about DaVinci Resolve 14 and how they might be able to use it as a full-time NLE,
Q&A: Build 8K Workflows Powered by NVIDIA – Sponsored
The naysayers might say, “8K, already? Why?” But the world continues to evolve, and so does technology. Post production apps are already embracing 8K, including Premiere Pro, SGO Mistika, Autodesk Flame and Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve, and NVIDIA GPUs are helping to power these workflows.
Camera manufacturers, such as RED and Sony are already there,
Q&A: Multidimensional Workflows, VR and More With SGO – Sponsored
Madrid-based SGO has been supplying tools for post production and its workflows for some time now. As the industry has evolved, so have SGO’s tools. We threw some questions at SGO CEO Miguel Angel Doncel and managing director Geoff Mills. Let’s find out more about this small company with big plans to help post artists streamline their varied workflows.
Telestream Q&A: QC Guide: Avoiding File Rejection and Additional Costs – Sponsored
A lot can go wrong in the world of file-based media. With the increasing number of delivery requirements, regulations and file types, and with so many more ways to get content to viewers, the linear supply chain is gone. That means the number and types of files to send has increased and the chance of making a mistake has gone up.
Q&A: EditShare Introduces Single-Node Storage Solution – Sponsored
Until today, the only option for media facilities wishing to take advantage of the performance, fault-tolerance and ease of management of a scale-out storage solution was to purchase a storage cluster consisting of three storage nodes and at least one metadata controller. While an excellent solution for moderate to large media enterprises, the on-average 96-TB capacity of the smallest three-node cluster available was often beyond the requirements and financial means of the thousands of smaller productions and media shops.