The following is an article written by Jay Ankeney for The Broascast Bridge about Blackbird in June 2019:

Blackbird has developed new frame-accurate codecs and rendering technologies that are faster than real time. And it’s all done in the cloud.

This company that is riding the crest of some remarkable technology has changed its calling card, maybe not to many peoples’ surprise.

“What was known as Forbidden Technologies is henceforth to be called Blackbird,” Ian McDonough, CEO of Blackbird began our (for me) early morning interview direct from Wimbledon, in the south of London. “Not only is ‘Blackbird’ the name of our editing platform, it also evokes the image of a cloud, since the proper collective term for a flock of blackbirds is a ‘cloud’.”

If you’ve read my last article about these adventurous folk, “Forbidden Puts Frame Accurate Editing in the Cloud” (August 3, 2018), you will already know that the tiger they have by the tail is the ability to offer a codec and supporting software infrastructure that enables spot-on frame accurate editing in cloud-based projects.

With Blackbird you can edit on any platform that has access to the Internet and cloud-based storage.

For those of us editors who have lived in the MPEG world of long GOP (Group of Pictures) compression in which individual frames may or may not actually exist, this can be a revelatory experience.

As McDonough explained to me, that is why in order to sign up 14 post-production companies into their new Blackbird Productions Partnership Program (“BP3”) over the last five months, it took a bit of educational explaining.

“Their customers are mostly in the London market so far, dealing with large scale documentary and reality shows,” he said, “because our codec and the browser-based tools behind it are all about efficiency and cost savings.”

This approach is all SaaS (Software as a Service), and BP3 has already made inroads into U. S. markets by licensing this approach to post houses.

But they have a second arm aimed at live sports and live news.

“We are in 20 local news markets that are part of the Meredith Corporation,” he said, “and we are making rapid inroads into sports.”

Besides being involved with Madison Square Garden sports production, BP3 is also providing services to the Buffalo Bills where it is being used to produce content for both broadcast and social media.

Then just on June 19th, Blackbird announced it had signed “a significant six-figure, multi-year deal with A+E Networks”.

You may never catch the guy pedaling down Machu Pichu in front of you on your spin bike, but you’ll be chasing him in frame accurate video!

Its technology will be used to “deliver major productivity enhancements across A+E Networks’ business” including creating content highlights to social media channels.

But the goal of this article is not just to establish BP3’s marketing bona fides (heck, I’m not even mentioning that all the video home Peloton stationary spin bikers race after is produced using Blackbird), I really wanted to find out how they make the magic of frame accurate editing in the cloud a reality.

Fortunately, Stephen Streater, founder of the company and its R&D director since he invented the software, was excellent at explaining it.

We know that MPEG is used to get video onto your TV, and for that it is pretty good,” Streater began, “but it was never designed to do the things like navigation (i.e. jog/shuttle), smooth bi-directional playback and frame accurate positioning that we need. And the standard used in a browser, HTML-5 also has its limitations when applied to these tasks.”

So to develop Blackbird, he turned to a multi-paradigm-programming language called Javascript. (Author’s note-not be confused with the Java programming language or the Java software platform).

“Javascript traditionally was just for little things like drop-down menus,” Streater said, “but in 2017 they came out with a new version called WebAssembly, a technology standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that could also do audio and video.”

WebAssembly (abbreviated Wasm) works on all browsers. It is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine.

 

WebAssembly was originally geared for video gaming, which is why most modern browsers support it on desktop and mobile platforms.

But Streater designed his own codec for video that allowed him to play back 1080P imagery at very high frame rate in Javascript.

“That means up to 4 billion people already have browsers that can use our Blackbird codec to play back 1080P video with frame accuracy in Javascript,” Streater wound up. “That means they don’t need additional configuration, no installation, once they have a license they simply go to a Web page and run and edit their video.”

Once you have loaded the Blackbird editing application, it creates proxies of your video faster than real time so you don’t need to work on the hi rez version and you only store the material that will actually be used in the final version.

All rendering is done in the cloud, so you don’t have to pause the editing process to wait for it. Since the software is platform agnostic, you can monitor it from any platform be it desktop or mobile.

As a product that lives in the cloud, you know that collaboration is central to Blackbird’s workflow.

Some people are taking remote editing as an option.

Blackbird is raising cloud-based editing to the level of indispensable.

The post Blackbird No Longer Forbidden appeared first on Blackbird.

Cloud infrastructures have become more interesting to media companies because of their potential to cost-effectively, and rapidly, scale operations up or down. Also, within a cloud environment, organisations can use or offer customers services and functionality that they have not had access to before. Right now, cloud infrastructures are especially interesting to content owners who want to control how, when and where their media is published.

Many cloud migration strategies focus on moving existing hardware or software functions and services from on-premises deployments, to run partly or completely on cloud infrastructure. But some developers are pursuing a cloud-native approach instead. Digital Media World spoke to Stephen Streeter, Director of Video Technology for the Blackbird cloud editing and publishing platform, developed by Forbidden Technologies. Instead of working with existing functionality, Blackbird builds re-configurable workflow capabilities specifically for the cloud environment.

A significant characteristic of Blackbird is its lack of many of the content interchange stages of traditional workflow automation. Raw materials – video, audio, graphics, stills – are only supplied to the platform through Blackbird‘s lightweight proprietary codec.

Going Cloud Native

Due to this codec, Blackbird‘s tools do not work on original content, but on low bitrate, bandwidth-efficient proxies. Blackbird manages the infrastructure and enables workflows for enriching, manipulating and delivering content using highly scalable publishing functions. It serves broadcast, social media, online and OTT destinations and viewers, and meanwhile, the owner can store and protect the content wherever they want.

“The cloud challenge has always been concerned with getting full-resolution video into the cloud and to work on it there. For a company with only average resources, that is expensive and impractical,” said Stephen. Blackbird‘s single piece of hardware, the Edge ingest server, is installed at the location where the original content resides. Selected content is placed on the server where the codec compresses and transcodes it into proxies that are uploaded to the platform as required – like a high-performance workstation on a lightweight connection of 2 mb/s.

“All users can then see the content and work on it with Blackbird‘s editing tools,” Stephen said. “Our two editing packages, Forte and Ascent (more details below), are built as cloud-native applications that avoid latency by completing all image processing tasks locally in the browser. We don’t have to wait for commands to reach the media, functions to complete in the cloud and results to be downloaded and finally displayed in the browser.

“Instead, the software has been designed with efficient, intuitive algorithms. When the editor selects the frames he or she wants to work on, Blackbird automatically downloads only the proxies for those frames and those immediately surrounding. Not only are the proxy frames light enough to download instantly, but because they now reside on the local hardware, no delay occurs for playback or processing.”

Efficiency and Speed

The Blackbird codec is optimised to work efficiently on software. It does not apply MPEG compression standards and file formats to media, which are optimised for hardware environments, but works through Javascript, which was developed to use as a scripting language for web clients.

The Blackbird proxies are used both for playback, without pre-rendering, and for editing. The original content is only involved at the point of publishing – even then it does not hold up operations because publishing proceeds directly from the Edge server where the content is being held, not the editor’s computer.

Stephen commented that the speed with which teams can publish video via the cloud is changing the broadcast landscape. Speed to market has always defined how competitive a broadcast company could be and, in turn, has traditionally been defined by expensive hardware. Now that the use of the internet and cloud services has altered the nature of the competition, the market has become fragmented. “Giant corporations, traditional broadcast outlets, plus the thousands of digital publishers trying to cut hardware costs to a minimum, can all compete. In fact, a company that does not have a hardware legacy, that is already prepared to run as a cloud-native business, has an edge,” he said.

Forte and Ascent

The Blackbird codec supports frames with a high degree of accuracy. This allows Forte’s navigation bar to also display and handle your media as individual frames, with timecodes, that you can access with precision. A logging system is included for adding metadata to customise searching and set up archiving later on. The non-linear editing tools are packaged into two applications. Forte is a full set of NLE tools, and Ascent is a simpler cutting and marking application for non-editors.

Editors have a working window, a viewing window that displays the edit as it is refined, and a timeline positioned below these two windows. They can look through the video, frame by frame if necessary, in exactly the same way that they would if the original media had been placed on the timeline in front of them. They can work on the audio and graphics tracks separately or together, and choose to display all or only one track. The trim modes available in the UI change depending on what the editor is trying to do. Users have access to many different fades, crossfades, fade-to-black and other transitions and effects, plus colour correction tools.

Ascent is a much simpler package for use by journalists, producers and other non-editorial members of the production who only need to make and review clips. When it comes to sharing between the team members, the only elements that are shared are the viewer, the editing tools and the page that will be published, which is also open for branding and advertising. In effect, everything, including all of the media, remains under the rights holder’s control.

Blackbird in Action

Looking at how different media companies use Blackbird illustrates the tools and how the video is handled. Von Johnson & Associates uses Blackbird to localise, produce and secure delivery of video content to television, feature film and international OTT platforms including Apple, Netflix and Amazon. Blackbird integrated directly into VJA’s existing media infrastructure and workflow, which uses a third-party facility management system to oversee existing operations.

They are able to process huge volumes of video content, including watermarking. Files can then be accessed and viewed within a few seconds via streaming from browser-based devices, anywhere in the world at any time – without fully downloading any files. In this case, the security advantages are especially important, as well as time and cost savings.

Blackbird is also fully integrated with Microsoft Azure Media Services, so that production teams can use the software platform running on Azure to turn live video into edited, enriched stories that are published through Blackbird and hosted on Azure. For example, sports broadcast and digital services supplier deltatre is using Blackbird through Azure to extend its OTT editing services for live and on-demand content for football, athletics, golf, rugby and cycling.

Atlas Digital uses Blackbird for post-production, dailies and secured delivery to TV, film and OTT clients. One of their specialities is customising efficient, secured video and audio finishing workflows for productions. Without having to download or upload completed work, the production team can use the Blackbird platform on a low bandwidth connection for review, annotation and approval within a minute of capture. Because Blackbird supports viewing and logging for up to 18 video sources and 36 audio channels, Atlas can supply live dailies concurrently to multiple locations, even as a growing file accommodating closed captioning.

For MSG (Madison Square Gardens) Networks, the media crew behind the Buffalo Sabres NHL ice hockey team in New York, speed is critical if they are to remain competitive within their role. They are using Blackbird to access, edit, add closed captions and publish video highlights of the Sabres’ matches to social media and TV for their international fans.

The Blackbird codec allows video to be frame-accurately viewed and edited 6 seconds after live from anywhere on bandwidth as low as 2Mbps. MSG’s video production teams also find that using tools in the cloud means they can avoid the potential technical points of failure that on-site hardware can cause.

The post Blackbird Takes Flight for Fast, Cloud Native Video Publishing appeared first on Blackbird.

With the Blackbird codec from Forbidden Technologies, cloud-based editing can be as fast and accurate as a desktop NLE.

Forbidden Technologies has announced a new powerful codec called Blackbird, and according to their vp of products, Jeff Krebs, it is the first codec designed from the ground up to manipulate video in the cloud.

“What people describe as a proxy codec in the cloud is usually some derivative of H.264 which is very good technology for the playback experience,” Krebs said. “If the readers of The Broadcast Bridge will go to the Blackbird section of our Web site they can play with the codec and see how easy it is to frame accurately go backward and forward through the video clip they will find there.”

“The difference between our approach and that of other post production systems is that with Blackbird we transcode the high bit rate source material and only upload a much lighter proxy to the cloud along with its metadata,” Krebs explained. “That all goes into a directory or folder that only the client can access.”

That gives the editor a very fast proxy workflow.

“Then when it comes to conforming the final sequence, we know where all the source material resides, so we can composite the project’s master from just the material that is needed,” Krebs said. Every project is secure because only someone with the proper credentials can access that material.

To edit and finish the post production of a project, the company offers a choice of two SaaS (Software as a Service) programs, each of which can run on any platform: Mac, Windows, Linux or Android.

The first is Blackbird Forte, a full featured NLE that can run on any platform and, significantly, only requires 5 Mbps to upload material to the cloud, and 2 Mbps for download and playback. Then there is Blackbird Ascent, a simplified SaaS system designed for production personnel who do not have a lot of video editing experience. Actually, as Krebs told me, “You should not need to spend more than a minute learning it.”

The Forte timeline provides a thumbnail image of each frame, and if you zoom in on it with a right/click (Windows) or option/click (Mac) a video waveform, and motion and scene changes are exhibited through patented patterns in the display. Closed captioning, data modification, timing, position and compliance functions are also displayed.

Operators can select clips during live shows through easy-to-learn keyboard shortcuts and macros that anyone from production assistant to producer can master. Both systems are pre-configured for one-button social media, OTT, online or file-based delivery—whichever distribution format is required.

To view the original article, click here. 

The post Forbidden Puts Frame Accurate Editing in the Cloud appeared first on Blackbird.

Forscene is traditionally known as a logging and review tool, enabling productions to save money by reducing the time taken in post-production. More recently though, we have expanded our professional video software to be an editor too, and it has been used by edit-producers and edit-directors to speed up the edit process. They can be viewing and logging material and creating rough cuts in Forscene, and they don’t even need to be in the same location as the editor, when time is of the essence!

Yet, as is the nature of our business, being a technology company, we’ve taken further steps to make Forscene an actual NLE, albeit one that is truly in the cloud. To that end, we recently held an event for editors in Soho, where we introduced them to Forscene for the first time. Some had used Forscene in years gone by, some had seen their edit-producers use it in an edit suite, and some had never even heard of us. We had demonstration pods and discussions around the use of Forscene and how they could envision it being used. Watch the video below for their reactions after the evening came to a close:

https://youtu.be/eJ7Zpl53lzE

At BVE next week, we’ll be showcasing the strength of Forscene during our Editing Masterclass speaking session in the Post Production Theatre on Tuesday 23^rd February from 16:20 – 17:00. Make sure you get there early to grab your seat, as we’ll be putting on a live demonstration of our collaboredit workflow, with Neil Roberts at the show and Jeff Krebs in Canada!

We’ll also be hosting speaking sessions on our stand (M30) so be sure to drop by at the following times to learn more about Forscene and how it can be applied to your production or company:

Tuesday 23^rd & Wednesday 24th
11:00 – Forscene on The Island: a remote workflow
12:00 – The editor’s cheat-sheet
14:00 – Master edit-prep in 10 easy steps
15:00 – What is collaboredit?

Tuesday 23^rd
16:20 – 17:00 – Cloud Editing Masterclass: Heightening Capability

Thursday 25^th
11am – The Edit Director’s take on Forscene: a guest presentation from Matt Born & Jo Woolf at DVTalent.

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The post What happens when you show Forscene to editors for the first time? appeared first on Blackbird.

https://youtu.be/-CeWtJtmj5w

I decided to start this blog post with a video, because it sums up what we’re presenting at this year’s BVE Expo. Taking place at the Excel Centre in London from 23-25 February, BVE brings together video production professionals and companies from around the UK (and some from Europe, too). Forscene will be on stand M30 on a bigger pitch than in previous years, as we incorporate an on-stand presentation area, where we’re inviting specially selected clients and partners to speak about cloud editing with Forscene. A full list of these sessions will be announced nearer to the show. We’re also hosting a panel in the Post Production Theatre on 23^rd February from 16:20 to 17:00, looking at practical ways to make the most of cloud-based remote editing systems with advice from leading post-production teams.

But I digress – you’re probably reading this wondering what on earth collaboredit is all about. Well, essentially it’s bringing together collaboration and editing and as we have always been the leaders in cloud editing, we thought we’d highlight the fact that Forscene is redefining post-production with innovative workflows and powerful features. From multicut to socialish (see definitions below), we see a need for a new language for the innovative workflows in post-production with Forscene.

Our latest Forscene release demonstrates this and is coming to a Forscene near you on 8^th February. But if you’re not already using Forscene, never fear, as you can also book a demo with a product specialist at BVE, to learn more about how Forscene could enhance your workflow.

Forscene-isms

Collaboredit [kuh-lab-uh-red-it]
To work together to create a video edit

Multicut [muhl-tee-kuht]
To edit together multicam clips

Socialish [soh-shuh-lish]
To export edited video straight to a social media account (i.e. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter)

Streamcut [streem-kuht]
To edit live stream of footage as it is uploaded to the cloud

Reproview [ri-proo-vyoo]
To review and approve video by adding comments directly on a timeline

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The post Collaboredit: Forscene at BVE Expo 2016 appeared first on Blackbird.

Now, one of the things I really dislike is when you’re editing a sequence, the programme crashes and you lose everything you’ve done in the last 10 minutes. Sometimes that’s not very much, but other times that can be a lot of work. If you’re lucky, the auto-save recovered some of the work, but seeing as that annoying little pop-up box only appears intermittently, chances are you’ve lost 10 minutes of work. It can be very frustrating. Luckily, when editing in Forscene, the professional video editing software continues to save your work every minute. And if you accidently exit the programme, the next time you launch Forscene, you can go to ‘previously saved versions’ (it’s the little recovery truck in the left side panel!) and load the last auto-saved version of the sequence.

In my overview blog post on editing time wasters, I was irritated by macros, or rather the lack of being able to create your own. Keyboard shortcuts are a feature of Forscene that are really very useful. Not only can you set keys to do any function that suits you, there are also pre-defined keyboard shortcuts that mirror functions in other well-known NLEs. Then there are macros, where you can set one key (or a combination of keys) to do multiple functions. In Forscene, you can add to existing keyboard shortcut lists or set up your own from scratch, and they will be saved in your account for use on different projects.

The next two time wasters I’m going to look at are menus and structured layouts. Trawling through menus and sub-menus, looking for specific transitions or effects that aren’t in your favourites’ is maddening. It’s great that many different effects are supported, but really, how many do you use? Structured layouts are another one that gets me down. Yes, you can set-up different workspaces for different projects, depending on whether you’re editing or reviewing, etc, but sometimes you just want to be able to move the timeline a few inches towards the top of the screen to save you from getting neck ache after an entire day of editing. Forscene allows you to move all windows within the application around freely – so they can be neatly lined up or overlapping each other!

I’m just going to touch on the last point briefly, as I covered it quite well in the overview blog: online support forums. The likes of Creative Cow are very useful, as they answer all queries on a range of video editing topics. Yet sometimes you just want to be able to quickly ask someone for help on how to use a function and not wait an hour for a reply. I see it as a time waster because it slows you down and could be a barrier for you being able to continue with editing a project. Forscene on the other hand has support teams available in the chat window to answer your questions in real-time, the ability to chat with other people in your project in a private chat window, as well as everyone working in Forscene in other accounts in the public chat window.

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The post Why saving a video project is an editing time waster appeared first on Blackbird.

To put this in context, I started editing at the beginning of the tape “Revolution”, cutting on ¾” U Matic and progressed through 1”, Betacam and various digital formats (D1, D2, D3, D5, D6 – not sure what happened to D4!) before switching to non-linear editing at the beginning of the 90’s. I have seen NLE systems progress from postage stamp size viewers with images that looked like they had been knitted, to the ability to edit 4K footage on a laptop and terabytes of storage in my rucksack.

Of course, the craft of editing remains the same, whether you are cutting on film, tape or non-linear, but the technology affects the way you work and the speed at which you can put things together. Non-linear editing has given us the freedom to experiment with different versions of our edits and to try out ideas that might otherwise have been lost.

Advances in computer power, storage and codecs mean that it is now possible to do things on a standard computer that would have taken a room full of equipment just a few years ago. The exponential growth of processing power coupled with the speed increases in Internet connectivity mean that is now possible to edit using a web-based application, giving you access to your material from anywhere on the planet and the ability to collaborate with your post-production team wherever they may be. Forscene frees you from the edit suite and allows truly global access to your media, with a sophisticated editing tool that can do 90% of what you need to do (the other 10% being grading, effects and audio mixing – really more finishing than editing).

Yes, we’re currently at the point on the curve where you have to work with proxies of your media, in much the same way as the NLE’s at the turn of the century, and then link back to your full resolution media for finishing. But as technology progresses I’m sure it will become possible to access full resolution media and finish your edit in the cloud.

Back in 1995 I was sure that we would have broadcast quality non-linear systems and I am equally sure that in a few years we will be editing and finishing in the Cloud:

The freedom of editing in the cloud reclaims the thinking time we lost with the advent of NLE’s: your morning commute can be a stroll to your sofa rather than fighting into town on the train. A spark of an idea at 11pm just as you are winding down for the day can be experimented with on your iPad, rather than forgotten about by the morning.

Being able to deliver in multiple formats and never having to render on your machine frees it (and you) to move on to the next step (or finish for the day while the pubs are still open!); and with multiple editors, loggers, transcribers and producers all able to access the same project and work on the same media it means that work can happen concurrently without each stage having to wait for the previous stage to finish.

I find the concept exhilarating and refreshing and as technology progresses the possibilities will be even greater. I wonder if we will look back on the current generation of editing tools with the same fondness that we have for the days of film?

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The post The evolution of editing – where will it go next? appeared first on Blackbird.

As we outlined in our overview of top video editing time wasters organising client review sessions can be quite difficult, as the director’s, producer’s and editor’s schedules never align. There is also the high costs of renting edit suites for these sessions, so using a cloud-based product, like Forscene, would be cost effective, as well as a time saver. Moreover, getting edits to the production crew in the first instance when they’re based in different locations is also time consuming. Setting up FTPs and loading footage onto it, or burning everything to a DVD or hardrive is a laborious task. Yes, there are runners and junior crew to do these things, but regardless of who carries out this chore, its still a time waster on the overall production.

And then there are times when you think you’ve finished an edit job and you get a list of corrections from the client, meaning you have to re-align the music to accommodate the extra 10 seconds of footage that needs to be added right in the middle of the video (deep breaths, it’s a painful memory)!

Simple video reviewing

Now this isn’t just a rant, as there is a solution available: Forscene allows for multiple users to access an account, meaning your director and producer can be reviewing your edits as they happen. Don’t panic just yet though editors, as this doesn’t mean crew members can come and re-order your edits. With Forscene you can set different access levels, so they would only be able to comment on edits on the timeline, not touch them. There is also the ability to send clips to people who aren’t Forscene users, via the Tasks function. With this feature, you simple drop a clip on to the button in the navigation panel in the interface and enter the email address of the person who you want to send it to.

If you want to know more about these simple and easy features that will make your editing workflow smoother and faster then book a demo with a Product Specialist today.

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The post Editing time waster: reviewing video appeared first on Blackbird.

We put this top of our list because it is hands down the number one bug-bear all editors, videographers, or anyone who has done any kind of video editing, hates to deal with. You’ve spent hours working on an edit and you then have to wait for an age as it renders from the editing application. Or, even more frustratingly, you do the above, and then someone spots an error and you have to re-edit and render it again! It can be very, very annoying.

Some people may not mind the rendering process, as it gives them an opportunity to do something else; the only catch being that this cannot be anything on your computer or laptop, because the rendering process requires so much CPU that doing other activities just slows it down even further.

There is a silver lining to this post though, as Forscene doesn’t require any rendering. Yes, you read that right: no video rendering. This is because the professional video editing software uploads low-resolution proxies of your footage, enabling you to edit the content together before some NLEs have even finished importing rushes. When you publish a video, it relinks with the hi-res, so no one would even know you were editing in the cloud…

Find out if Forscene could help your production by booking a demo with a Product Specialist now.

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The post Editing time waster: video rendering appeared first on Blackbird.

https://youtu.be/nDjpWD3SBZQ

One of the biggest buzzwords of the last few years has got to be “The Cloud”, it seems everybody and everything is in “The Cloud” and if you’re not using it you’re missing out.

Of course all the cloud (I’ll drop the parentheses) actually is, is another computer in a data centre somewhere that is accessible through the Internet. The benefit of this for your email account, shared documents and photo collections is that you can access them from anywhere and they are safe in the event of a computer failure.

But could this ever work for video? Video files are huge and the idea of having to upload all of your media to a server and then try to access that media over a typical Internet connection doesn’t make any sense.

One team that saw the benefit of using the cloud for editing is Forscene. We released a cloud-based post production system over ten years ago, before most people even knew what the cloud was! This is real editing, not just sub-clipping or review and approval, but real honest to goodness frame accurate editing with multiple video and audio tracks.

The way that Forscene gets around the issues of moving huge files around is by transcoding all your files into lightweight proxies which can be uploaded to the cloud faster than realtime. They can then be viewed in real time on almost any device, using a connection as slow as 1.5Mb/s, and can be logged and edited frame accurately. You can then choose to publish using the full resolution media or to export an AAF, XML or EDL for relinking back to your original media in your editing application of choice.

But technology keeps moving on and the arrival of cloud-based video streaming using Microsoft Azure or Amazon EC2 has opened up even more possibilities. Forscene has the option to take live streams from a camera or an OB unit directly into the cloud. There the Forscene server can run as a virtual machine, transcoding the media into lightweight proxies which you can access just as before.

The difference is that the live streams become available to edit roughly 15 seconds behind real time. For a live event such as a concert or a football match this allows the editor to access the media from anywhere in the world and start cutting sequences even though the event is still in progress. They can add graphics, titles, music or voiceover and once the sequence is complete, Forscene can publish the edit using the full resolution media in the cloud, to a server or content delivery network without ever having to download the media.

This workflow was used on one of the biggest international sporting events of 2015 by our partners deltatre to deliver over 700 clips to YouTube without a single hardware box.

We will be demonstrating this live at IBC using a motor racing simulator on our stand. Using Microsoft Azure Media Services we will be taking multiple cameras into the Azure servers as Smoothstream video at it’s full resolution, giving you the ability to edit the media as the race is happening. In my career as an editor this is one of the most incredible things I have ever seen, near live editing of multicamera material from almost anywhere. Why don’t you drop by and give it a try?

Book a demo on stand 8.B38e today, before it’s too late.

The post How can you possibly edit in real-time over a 1.5Mb/s connection? appeared first on Blackbird.