Posted: 18/05/2015
We’re always looking to engage the many students who use Forscene with meaningful real-to-life examples within technical workflows, in order to accomplish the best results and clear creative objectives. Here at Forscene, we realise that educational establishments, like many of our clients in industry, have invested a great deal into their current infrastructure. Therefore, a solution like Forscene, which they can integrate seamlessly, is an added bonus. Forscene is a powerful cloud-based editing tool, which could shape, form and dictate the direction of their workflows.
One of the areas where we pride ourselves within the education sector is that we offer the same expertise and professional workflow to the education sector as we do the industry. However, recognising the important investment in the future generation of editors, we invest our time in training and equipping our students in this solution, so that they are ready for industry.
There are a variety of workflows, however the two most common ones are:
• Camera ingest, then upload from laptop.
• Camera ingest, connect to networked storage (such as SAN, Edit Share, NAS or Avid ISIS) then upload using a Forscene ingest server installed on the campus or venue of choice.
With all of these different ways of working, it culminates in content being transcoded in the cloud. This system doesn’t need a high level of upload speed, around 1.5mbps connection will suffice, as 15:1 proxy versions of the original media are uploaded to the Forscene cloud instead of the original high-res source. Forscene supports a whole host of formats and there is a list of them available, should you be interested – just contact me.
What should you do if you need to do a final edit or use a third party NLE tool like Avid, Adobe or Final Cut? There are ways of exporting an AAF or XML from Forscene and conforming the original media for the finishing touches. The majority of our education clients use Avid, for example, and this is one way of relinking media within the Avid environment.
The process would involve ingesting an Avid MXF to Forscene. Forscene picks up and stores all the information needed to generate an AAF already linked to the source material in Avid Media Composer. It might be necessary to open a bin containing the material before it becomes visibly linked. Avid Media Composer stores separate tracks into separate files, and Forscene will re-combine these files into one item during it’s ingest. It will refuse to ingest and notify you if some of these files are missing:
1. Re-linked
i. Ingest to Forscene and ingest to Avid independently from camera source files.
ii. Generate AAF in Forscene and import it into Avid Media Composer. You have to relink the clips and sequence to the ingested material in Avid Media Composer, and that depends on reelname and disk label matching up. Some cameras generate (non-Avid) MXF files and these contain a unique ID for the media that Forscene uses.
2. Import workflow
i. Ingest to Forscene from camera source files and generate an AAF that relates to filenames of the material.
ii. Import AAF to Avid and then use “Bulk import” in Avid to ingest the material.
iii. At the moment Forscene only includes the filename, not the directory into the AAF, so be sure to set up multiple cameras to generate unique filenames!
3. Mixed
Any mix of the above as long as filenames and/or reelnames are the same.
One of our longstanding clients, Ravensbourne has successfully used Forscene to integrate within their pre-existing workflow and to maximise their infrastructure. From the aspect of the financial investment in Forscene, the level of results and impact felt by their students has been high, especially considering the low levels of investment when compared to other products on the market. The relatively low cost of the solution, is due to our investment in cloud technology that minimises the necessity for physical infrastructure.
If this has got you thinking about your own workflow, please contact me to see how Forscene can be integrated into your higher education institution.
Enoch
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