Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/297945
34 Post • April 2014 www.postmagazine.com as they inter-connect and then separate again at various intervals — is working on a new metadata and media management data- base tool it is tentatively calling Connect. Cioni points out that Light Iron was founded in 2009, around the time of the birth of the industry's transition to all-digital workflows, for the purpose of helping the industry pio- neer on-set dailies and data management concepts, and has now evolved into a dailies and workflow management service provider and software development technology com- pany. He is well acquainted with how the industry has changed in the short time since digital acquisition and workflows altered the content-creation paradigm. He calls Connect and the philosophy behind it an attempt to offer the industry a streamlined, single database system that all groups plugging into a single production can use and pull from in a cohesive and efficient manner. Along the way, he also calls it an example of the direction post companies need to go to remain relevant and financially viable on this new landscape — by develop- ing software themselves that they need to use to solve the very problems they are try- ing to manage for content creators. "We have long used the phrase 'price per frame,' meaning we are not talking about the price someone might charge for the work, but rather, the emotion, the physical effort, and the time involved," Cioni explains. "It is about the idea that if you have two images on the screen and they both look great, you could say that both groups that created them must know what they are doing. But did the ends justify the means? If one of them was created with great time involved, lots of headaches, frustration, damaged relation- ships, emotional costs, and so on, then ulti- mately, that image can't be judged just on whether or not it looked great, because there was an additional cost associated with it beyond money. It needed to be a more efficient process. I believe post production companies need to be in the business of custom software to solve these problems — they have to develop it themselves. "And that is what we are doing with Light Iron Connect. A big desire of the content- creator community has been to have a single database for metadata and media manage- ment. The process is all broken up into differ- ent slices — one group works on-set, one group does color, one group does Web streaming, one group does visual effects, one group tracks color, and so on. That is the broken part of the [digital] process. When everyone shot film, Kodak might have made the film, but you could buy it at the same lab where you were developing and printing it in many cases. Today, all these different groups are involved, and yet, we have no ubiquitous system and file format that take files that film- makers create and combine them into one process for data management. That is what we are doing with Connect — building a single database system of tools so that everyone can pull out of the same place." Cioni says Connect is still in development and will not be demonstrated at NAB, but that it is being tested on certain client shows. Light Iron intends to start a campaign to demonstrate it in coming months, and Cioni expects to offer the industry more informa- tion about it around the time of Cinegear this summer. Another interesting trend is the industry's move toward combining cloud computing with mobile post services in locations where bandwidth makes such data transfer and processing methodologies feasible. Color- front, the renowned Hungarian post produc- tion facility and digital software development company responsible for creating widely- used on-set dailies and transcoding tools across the industry, has been aggressively exploring this capability in recent months. Late last year, in fact, the company announced the formation of a new initiative called Col- orfront Cloud Services, offering clients the ability to centralize processing tasks and stor- age off-site, lowering computing footprints and associated costs on-site, and allowing productions to upload and process image data online and then download and view it through special interfaces while still on-site. While a handful of quality online dailies viewing systems have been around for some time now, the notion of being able to share original image capture data and collaborate on it for tasks including dailies color correc- tion, and then turn them around for viewing, notes and re-correction online using a wide- ly-available, non-proprietary tool, is a newer strategy. Aron Jaszberenyi, co-founder of Colorfront, says the latest version of the company's Transkoder automated digital file conversion product, for example, which it will be displaying at NAB, is a technology that the company has discovered can fit in with its cloud initiative in this way. "We have worked with a number of tech- nologies, such as Pix, Dax, WebGate, and COPRA for dailies viewing through cloud services," Jaszbereyni says. "The next step is moving high-quality, original camera data and collaboratively working with it in the cloud. Transkoder is currently used by many of our customers in their data centers, but many are considering moving storage and processing into the cloud as an immediate next step. So we are working with Amazon Web Services and have Transkoder running on their GPU- enabled G2 nodes. It can be ramped up flexibly, and paid for by the hour, or reserved long term, so it is all quite flexible. AWS infrastructure is also complaint with all MPAA best practices and infrastructure controls." Jaszberenyi adds, "Colorfront also has an accelerated network upload technology that allows us to upload media to the cloud. As an example, we can upload faster than real- time 4K Sony F55 RAW footage through our Gigabit network from Budapest to Amazon Light Iron's Lily Pad is an on-set creative suite of tools. On-Set Paradigm Shifts