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The annual Sundance Film Festival, which took place in Utah last month, built on its success last year in using Camera to Cloud technology for the Festival Daily Recap and for videos distributed in theaters and across its social media channels. The idea is to capture special moments at the festival to compile them into a reel to distribute across festival venues and social media later the same day. It's a complex operation that calls for multiple camera crews working in separate places simultaneously, each with a producer and camera operator. Last year, in a comprehensive field test, the festival gave Camera to Cloud a trial run to see if it would speed up the workflow. It proved to be extremely successful, and the crews were delight- ed with the results. So, this year, they added even more cloud-connected camera teams. "For the second consecutive year the Sundance Film Festival has harnessed the power of cut- ting-edge Atomos Camera to Cloud technology to streamline their postproduction workflow," commented John Restivo, Senior Sales Engineer at Atomos. "Using our progressive upload feature for the first time, 15 camera crews sent footage direct from their location to Frame.io almost in real-time. As a result, the team of remote editors was able to cut the daily packages in Adobe Premiere Pro much faster and with simpler logistics than before they adopted Camera to Cloud." Camera to Cloud (C2C) is one of the fast- est-growing technologies in video production. It massively speeds up the content creation process by reducing the time between acquisition and post-production because there's no need to ship hard drives or copy files. C2C sends video from the camera directly to the cloud so that the editor, or editors, can access content remotely with just a standard internet connection. Atomos, with its net- work-connected, on-camera range of monitor-re- corders, provides an easy and cost-e'ective way to adopt C2C workflows. At Sundance, the camera crews used Canon C300 Mark II cameras, each mounted with an Atomos Ninja monitor-recorder fitted with a Connect module. The combined set-up is portable and unobtrusive, and yet it allows camera teams to connect as easily to their post production team in the same town as across the world. The Ninja is Atomos' most a'ordable ProRes monitor-recorder. It has a bright, 5-inch HDR screen and can capture RAW video from a vast range of DSLR and mirrorless cameras to inexpensive removable SSD drives. Lightweight, compact, and typically mounted directly on the camera, it has become an essential part of many filmmakers' and content creators' toolkits. The Connect module provides cloud connectivity. In a Camera to Cloud workflow, the Ninja simul- taneously captures two versions of the footage: a high-quality Apple ProRes 'hero' file and a light- weight H.265 HEVC 2K or 1080 'proxy' file that gets instantly uploaded, in this case to Frame.io from Adobe, allowing remote editors to quickly cut the packages with Adobe Premiere Pro. Proxy file sizes are much smaller than the original hero files, so they will load faster, use less processing power and, most importantly, upload to the cloud much faster using the public internet. For social media platforms, proxy video quality is perfectly usable. New for the Sundance crew this year was the use of progressive upload. This is included in Atomos' monthly Camera to Cloud plan and means that files start uploading while the Ninja is still recording, and it allows the o'-site editors to start cutting sooner. This feature alone massively speeds up the workflow as many cameras record times are over an hour long. It's a robust process, where, even if the connection is temporarily lost, the file upload resumes as soon as connectivity returns. The high bitrate and low bitrate versions share the same file name and timecode reference, in case the packages need be auto-conformed in Premiere for a high-res- olution, color-corrected, finished project. The camera crews used a combination of wired connectivity where available, or Wi-Fi over a bonded cellular network. Sclera Digital, a cinema equipment rental company based in Los Angeles and an Atomos partner, provided seven Peplink bonded dual band Wi-Fi systems with two embed- ded LTE modems. Camera to Cloud has matured to a point where it is simple to use and reliable. The successful operation at this year's Sundance Festival is a great illustration not only of how technology can solve complex logistical production issues, but also how filmmakers very quickly adopt and adapt to this new production paradigm. ATOMOS AT SUNDANCE 2024 SPONSORED CONTENT