Richie Murray leads the team, which is comprised of brilliant IT, support, sales and presentation professionals. They specialise in software and hardware for media focused applications, designed for both the creative and IT framework. This includes playback and ingest streaming server installations, networking, as well as phonetic search just to name a few of the product types they represent. Bridge Digital has been a Forscene reseller for 2 years now and one thing is clear: they are well respected among the vendors and suppliers alike.

Bridge Digital has strong relationships with several US TV stations, which makes them a perfect fit for distributing Forscene. As Richie says of our cloud based editor: “Personally, I like the way Forscene is able to work alongside an existing video production workflow, no matter what system is in place. The ability to view, log, edit and publish using video content captured and stored with the customer’s existing infrastructure is incredibly powerful.”

I work quite closely with Richie and his team and it’s really beneficial for us to have resellers around the world, to help support clients locally if they need it. It’s not just about the language barriers we can face in some countries, as Chris recently explained in his recent blog post, but it’s also about having resellers with in-depth knowledge of a specific aspect of the industry that helps us to bring Forscene to more people.

I was fortunate enough to present our cloud-based professional editor, Forscene, at the Bridge Digital open house event, hosted at the City Winery in downtown Nashville. It was immediately evident that music is not the only reason to visit. Studios, national broadcasters, independent production companies, producers, as well as a host of major media and IT vendors attended the two sessions I presented at. Forscene stood out as the most unique product that Bridge Digital represents in the live ingest to post-production workspace. My presentation focused on specifically the ability to grab live streams from any infrastructure, quickly clip and edit the media, and perform a cloud conform push to any social platform. Based on immediate swarms that gathered after my presentation, asking me to repeat the demo, Forscene was clearly a unique and relevant cloud-editing platform that complements our mature long format offering. As a music producer said to me at the conclusion of my presentation, “Forscene is music to my ears”.

Follow us on social media:

Twitter     Facebook     LinkedIn     Google+

The post Bridge Digital: A Forscene reseller appeared first on Blackbird.

4K is here to stay

Every year, IBC has an official theme; this year’s was “Content Everywhere”, but then there are also the trending technologies that create the actual themes for the show. One of the themes for 2015 was again 4K; with both Netflix and Amazon offering 4K streaming, BT Sport launching a 4K channel and Sky promising a 4K channel soon, there is obviously a lot of 4K production in the pipeline. 4K cameras are everywhere; post-production systems are all adding 4K capability and the cost of a 4K TV for consumers has fallen below the magic £500 mark so a lot of people are buying them even if they don’t realise that there is precious little 4K content as of yet.

…and 8K is making itself known

In the future zone at IBC they were already demonstrating 8K TV. Personally, I think that is a bit of a stretch for the average living room, but if you have a spare $133,000 you can buy a set already from Sharp. One area where 8K resolution might make sense is sports. A locked off 8K camera covering the entire playing area could be useful as a master source from which HD or 4K content could be generated, both for the broadcaster and for the officials, ensuring that no part of the game is ever missed. I wouldn’t like to think what the bandwidth would be to stream 8K content to the home though!

The downfall of 3D

I am personally very glad the see that 3D (or to be more accurate, Stereoscopic) has faded mostly into obscurity. Most broadcasters have quietly shut down their 3D channels and nobody is really pushing the whole 3D thing anymore. Even Hollywood seems to have gone off the idea with the number of 3D movies falling. In 2012, 41 movies had 3D attached to them; in 2013, 35 movies; and in 2014, just 28 movies involved 3D (source: Brandwatch).

Certainly, my own experience was that whilst the production and post-production processes involved far more equipment and potential for error, clients were unwilling to pay much of a premium for 3D programming. Goodbye 3D, see you in another 20 years.

The Cloud at IBC

The omnipresent thing at IBC this year was “The Cloud”, with many manufacturers offering cloud-based solutions for storage, review and approval, sub-clipping and logging; although it was interesting to see that the only offerings with real editing like Forscene were really “remote access” systems rather than truly cloud-based solutions. With the addition of more video and audio tracks, auto sync, multicam editing and AAF import, Forscene is developing into a remarkably powerful editing tool. The freedom and flexibility it offers to production teams allows for considerable savings in both time and money, something that is increasingly important when programme budgets are continuing to shrink.

Forscene: IBC 2015 review

Forscene had a great show; we had a racing simulator on our stand, which attracted a lot of visitors. But it was not just a gimmick: by streaming video and audio feeds from the two cameras and the simulator itself we were able to demonstrate our “Boxless” workflow, with the feeds being transcoded in the cloud into our proxy format. This allows editors to edit the race almost live (about 20 seconds behind live to be exact) using a cloud-based editing system that will run on any computer and only needs 1.5Mb/s Internet bandwidth. (To put that in perspective, your 3G connection on your mobile should be twice that!). This workflow then enables you to publish directly to YouTube, Twitter or a content delivery network without a hardware box in sight. This has enormous potential for sports, news and other live or near-live workflows and has already been used for a major European Sporting event this summer. Certainly the visitors I demonstrated the system to were blown away by the possibilities.

So looking back, IBC was incredibly successful for us; the response of all the visitors to the stand was overwhelmingly positive and we have an enormous number of leads to follow up on. I see great things for Forscene going forwards and I definitely think we are in pole position for the race to NAB!

Follow Forscene on social media:

Twitter     Facebook     LinkedIn     Google+

The post IBC 2015 review: in the rear view mirror appeared first on Blackbird.

The CCE is a non-profit organisation with the goal of bettering the art and science of picture editing in all media. Through a better understanding of each other, and teaching others in the industry they hope to advance the profile of professional film editors. Their aim is to spark passion and bring recognition to those who create the last draft of the script by weaving a mosaic of picture and sound in the cutting rooms across Canada.

Cloud based editing platforms are becoming more and more common to the professional post environment. In this CCE Salon an entire workflow of one scene was examined, from ingest to final output using professional video editing software, Forscene. Jeff Krebs, Forscene’s North American Regional Manager, gave the presentation and the editors were impressed with what they saw.

The 90-minute presentation focused on a number of key topics and below you can find video highlights.

INTRODUCTION TO THE FORSCENE CLOUD

https://youtu.be/IzvC7k5buds

USER EXPERIENCE AND INGEST

https://youtu.be/QeSv2fYAsLQ

SPLURGE TRACK AND VISUALISATION

https://youtu.be/2fk1Xm4Ldqs

THE LOGGING PROCESS

https://youtu.be/MYCOeybn-Zk

THE EDIT PROCESS

https://youtu.be/gdd_z2uvHW0

MULTICAM

https://youtu.be/MsoqbBKl-1w

PUBLISHING

https://youtu.be/HjFLqojgCjM

Follow Forscene on social media:

Twitter     Facebook     LinkedIn     Google+

The post Canadian Cinema Editors and Forscene appeared first on Blackbird.

Some of their productions include lifestyle programs, Til Debt Do Us Part (over 100 episodes produced), the hit Food Network series Pitchin’ In and The Opener, and Buy It, Fix It, Sell It for HGTV.

Last Fall, when Frantic Films was introduced to Forscene, they knew that it would be perfect to utilise for the production of the second series of Buy It, Fix It, Sell It. I spoke with Stephanie Fast, Post Production and Operations Manager, and John MacKinnon, Lead Assist on the show in Toronto about their experience in this Forscene case study:

https://youtu.be/5hvZcZBX2Zs

About Stefanie Fast:

As Post Production and Operations Manager, Stephanie is responsible for post-production of all programs and the management of Toronto facilities and IT needs. She has successfully overseen delivery of many award-winning programs, coordinating with the production and post-production teams working in Frantic Films’ 16 edit suites in Winnipeg and Toronto.

About Buy It, Fix It, Sell It

A trio of top professional ‘fixers’ battle for the best junk at auction, then transform it and try to sell it for big profits.

Bonnie

Follow Forscene on social media:

Twitter     Facebook     LinkedIn     Google+

The post Buy It, Fix It, Sell It: a Forscene case study appeared first on Blackbird.

Video management in college sports is a marketing activity. In many (and potentially most) colleges, the production teams actually sit within the marketing departments. Therefore their focus, challenges and even language are very marketing focus. They tend to care most about share of voice, reach, ROI, and impact. Marketing metrics not to dissimilar to metrics we use at Forscene. At SVG we had the opportunity to speak to a number of colleges and partners to investigate their main challenges and see whether Forscene could help them meet their objectives. There are 2 main challenges that colleges face:

1. How to better utilise their archive content
2. How to get content to their ‘non present’ audience quickly

The archive content challenge is interesting. Colleges have thousands of hours of content that they’d like to be able to re-use and expose within their live content, or as part of their highlights reels. The challenges they face are both finding appropriate meta tagged content, and easily bringing it into their production. Our history in observational documentaries, and managing huge shooting ratios through world-class logging and metadata capabilities was of real interest. Colleges could see the benefits of searching their archive and bringing specific plays, players or events into their production quickly and efficiently.

The second challenge is one we are well aware of. How can a college better engage their social audiences by distributing their video content quickly. Forscene’s integration with Facebook, YouTube and other content distribution networks means that colleges can distribute their edited content from live to on their social networks or website in under 90 seconds. They can also bring in graphics, titling, voice over and metadata to create broadcast quality content in seconds. Suddenly a traditionally workflow that would have taken them minutes or even hours can be completed, remotely, or on location in seconds. It’s the difference between distributing content first and distributing content second. Any marketer will tell you that first is first and second is nowhere. Our existing sports clients that have switched to the Forscene workflow now demonstrate an additional ROI in the volume of packages they create in any given day, vs a traditional workflow, giving fans more for less.

The delegates loved Forscene. They were keen to explore the depth of the product, and like most people seeing Forscene for the first time they couldn’t believe that we didn’t have a dedicated high-speed connection and that the entire demonstration was completed through a standard Internet browser. We will be continuing our discussions with a number of colleges and partners and hope to grow our presence within this segment over the coming months. Suffice to say, Forscene and college sports are made for each other!

Follow Forscene on social media:

Twitter     Facebook     LinkedIn     Google+

The post Forscene Solves College Sports Challenges appeared first on Blackbird.

Review: Forbidden Technologies Forscene

”This cloud-based editing platform doesn’t want to replace your NLE, but instead complement it.” Brady Betzel

In December of 2013 I wrote a review of the Forscene platform from Forbidden Technologies. Back then, I went into some detail about the product and how nice it was to be able to do a rough edit from just about anywhere, including my local Starbucks. Simply, Forscene is a cloud-based, nonlinear logging, editing, reviewing and publishing browser-based platform.

When I first got a look at Forscene, a little over a year ago, I admit I was a little put off by the interface. It had the look of the light grey Avid Media Composer setting if it was on a Windows 95 PC. While looks aren’t everything, looking good doesn’t hurt. Since that time, Forscene has taken a great step forward in terms of interface design. They have also improved the tools’ technical abilities. I will get to those upgrades shortly.

It seems that over the past five years broadcast post has been trying to expand out of its Los Angeles and New York footprints and allow editors, producers and, even, loggers to work from anywhere. From an iceberg in Alaska to the desert in Arizona, post pros are trying to master the monumental feat of true cloud-based editing. When working in a small group, this can pretty much be accomplished now, however, working with 10, 20 or, maybe even, 50 people over the cloud can be a challenge, both technically as well as in terms of asset management.

At the beginning of the cloud hysteria I was very skeptical, much like anything new I suppose. Building a story is/was always about bringing together many people from different viewpoints to build something that was interesting and intriguing. So alienating people by allowing them to edit from their couch, nowhere near a physical meeting place, seemed counterintuitive to me. What did intrigue me, however, was how cloud-based editing could help in the pre-post production process, and that is what I am focusing on for this review of Forscene’s latest release — how cloud-based editing, using Forscene, can shorten the post processes as well as allow content from the field to be quickly logged, edited into a basic string-out, reviewed and even relinked in Media Composer when the master tapes arrive back at the post production offices.

Digging In

I tested Forscene on my Windows 8.1 tablet, and it worked great. It didn’t matter if I was at home on my private WiFi network or at Starbucks; I was always able to work with my content. In the latest release of FORscene, there has been updates to its iPad and Android functionality (I personally don’t have an iPad or Android tablet), editing enhancements with ability to view and edit up to 18 synced multi-camera clips, isolate different audio tracks from different clips in the actual multicam group, new publishing formats like MXF, and new ingest formats like Red and ProRes 4:2:2. There have been improvements in the media asset management and logging sides as well, but I am focusing on the editing side for this review.

Overall, Forscene works better than many cloud-based platforms I’ve used. The NLE is intuitive and can be learned within 30 minutes to an hour. Forscene even has some tutorials on their YouTube page to get you up to speed pretty quickly. I would suggest you ask someone like Jeff Krebs over at Forbidden to do a Skype tutorial of the interface; it was about 45 minutes long and afterwards I felt very comfortable with it. Without that tutorial I would have wasted some time reading manuals and finding my way around the platform. There is even a keyboard layout name “JK,” which are his initials. His layout is very editor friendly. The one thing that is a little different is how FORscene uses left clicks and right clicks to get to different menu options. In the end, it is an efficient way to get a lot of options to you, but it is a little hard to get going at first.

So why would someone working in a post house or in post on a reality show want to use FORscene when they are comfortable using Media Composer, Adobe Premiere Pro, or Apple FCP X? I think that FORscene can save you time and money in both getting dailies from the field shoot to the office faster, facilitate sending your interviews to be transcribed as soon as possible, as well as beginning a rough cut once your footage is loaded into Forscene.

There are working two options when using Forscene: One: Software as a Service, meaning you log into forscene.net and you are off and running. Two: an attached Linux-based server that is installed alongside your shared storage. The benefit to the attached server is that it is fast; you can upload to Forscene’s servers at four times realtime. To upload your footage you can use their web interface, or with the attached server you can set up watch folders to grab the media once ingested into your NLE and then upload in the background. One great thing about the Forscene service is that if you need 20 seats one month you pay for 20 seats, if you need 45 the next month you pay for 45, and if you scale back to 20 you only need to pay for 20.

Forscene is Java-based. The only downside to this is if you have a client that is not allowed to install Java onto their system — they won’t be able to access Forscene. While that may not seem like a problem you would run into, I have worked at places that are Mac-based and will not allow for Java to be installed, so it can be a potential problem if you interface with workers who can’t use your tools.

Testing

My first test was a gamble, I’ve worked on a few shows where producers felt like they needed to shoot iPhone video and wanted to edit it and/or just view it on a timeline. This time I logged into my FORscene account and uploaded a video directly from my iPhone 6. When uploading, it first compressed my video locally on my iPhone and then uploaded it. It was pretty cool to know that in a pinch you could potentially upload footage just using your 4G/LTE connection and your iPhone camera. The only rub is that if the frame rates don’t match, you won’t be able to edit it in the same FORscene sequence as your masters without transcoding first, so my advice is to run many tests. Hopefully mixed frame rate sequences are on the Forscene horizon.

Second, I wanted to check out the keyboard shortcuts. I really like how Forscene seems to have updated its default set of keyboard shortcuts to a more Avid-centric keyset. The obvious JKL — I and O — are there, as well as multicam switching options and many more. One of my favorite improvements is the integration of macros. If you have a set of keystrokes that you use often you can set those up as hot keys. I wish other NLEs (and by others I mean Media Composer) would integrate this… it could be a game changer.

One thing I don’t really care for inside of Forscene is the inability to make new sequences with a File > New Sequence or right click inside of the library window and click Create New Sequence. This is kind of a weird pet peeve for me, but being able to only make a sequence by throwing a clip into the source window and cutting it into the record side gets a little clunky.

Forscene does have a cool way of displaying audio and video data when looking for a very broad view quickly. Typically, waveforms represent audio in NLEs, Forscene has a unique approach with dark areas representing quieter audio and lighter areas representing louder audio. Visually, there is an interesting bar that shows almost a smeared version of the video, it gives a fast representation of where action happens without having to look at each frame or scrub through your entire video. At first I kind of laughed at what this was, but as I got comfortable with it I really wanted it inside of Media Composer — definitely something you need to see for yourself.

In the Field

Forscene is a frame-accurate NLE with a great logging and publishing backbone. If I was running my own TV show, I would definitely integrate FORscene into my workflow. Allowing producers/camera people in the field to upload proxy files from Sony XDCAM discs before physically shipping the discs back is a dramatic increase in productivity. Not only can you begin logging or transcribing fast, but you can begin a rough cut much sooner than if you had to wait for tapes/drives to be delivered.

If nothing else, your team will be within a day of watching dailies and can ask for pick-up shots or pick-up interviews within a reasonable time frame and not two weeks later when your principal cast members may have drastically changed their appearances or even refused to film.

I ran through an XDCAM proxy upload at Starbucks to a high-resolution conform on my Avid Symphony at home by exporting an AAF from Forscene, importing in Symphony and relinking to the high-resolution Sony XDCAM media I had on my local storage, and it worked great while maintaining the metadata — if offline to online always worked this way it would be a dream.

Summing Up

In the end, if you are heading out to NAB 2015 I would definitely give Forscene a good, long look. Even if you’ve seen Forscene before, you should check it out once more. If you think outside the post-production box a little, you’ll recognize how useful it could be. Again, it’s one of the best cloud-based NLEs I’ve used.

It also helps that Forscene isn’t trying to replace your NLE, but instead complement it. With the ability to export AAFs and import them into Media Composer you can quickly do a relink to your media to get up and running with string-outs made in Forscene or even new media pulls from a producer that is sitting in the edit bay next to you. With the ability to export markers (locators) to your Media Composer sequence you can integrate client notes within a matter of seconds rather than referencing a print out or an email with roughly close timecodes (which still can be done if you want to).

As originally published at http://postperspective.com/review-forbidden-technologies-forscene/

Follow Forscene on social media:

Twitter     Facebook     LinkedIn     Google+

The post PostPerspective’s review of Forscene by Brady Betzel appeared first on Blackbird.

Now what’s exciting is that 8 out of the top 10 production companies from the Peer Poll use Forscene in their workflows – Love Productions, Twofour, The Garden, Windfall, Studio Lambert, Raw TV, Keo Films and Wall to Wall. These companies make popular UK television programmes like Gogglebox, The Voice UK, Who Do You Think You Are?, The Great British Bake Off and Gold Rush. It might be just to log rushes, store media, for review and approval, or a combination of these tasks – the point is Forscene has the right features and is versatile enough to be used every which way.

The flexibility of the cloud

Moving to video production in the cloud has not been a speedy changeover – production companies haven’t switched to it overnight. There are a lot of debates around reliability and security of editing in the cloud (and if you’re someone who is sat on the fence you should give this article a read!). I’m not going to give a lecture on how with the right infrastructure it is safe though, but I am an advocate for it.

Cloud-based video production with Forscene is useful to production companies because it allows for multiple account users and easy sharing of clips. There’s a comment track for review, as well as a private chat window for quick communication. You have control of your account with visibility and role management, so users can only see or use certain features in the editor. And this is just naming a few of the things Forscene can do – I haven’t even mentioned the advanced editing features yet and I need a megaphone to tell you how great it is for working globally (but I shall save these for other posts)!

We’re proud to be used by some of the biggest production companies in the UK and hope that our relationships with them continue to grow as new and improved features are developed.

If you’re a user of Forscene and have something to add about how you use it, then leave us a comment or tweet us @forscenepro.

Amy

Follow Forscene on social media:

Twitter     Facebook     LinkedIn     Google+

The post 8 out of top 10 production companies use Forscene appeared first on Blackbird.