Marquis Broadcast has delivered business-critical systems for some of the largest media brands worldwide via its integration services. With some of the industry’s most experienced developers, plus decades of development experience within the broadcast and media market, Marquis builds complex workflow solutions around existing third-party products and systems. A recent project for a large broadcaster involved creating a new voiceover tool to enable vocal scripts to be recorded remotely and sent to shared storage without needing to take up valuable engineering resources (studio or sound recordist). The actor would sit in a voiceover booth and simply talk through the script, which was displayed on a screen in front of them. They simply press ‘start’ and the named files get saved and pushed back to the shared storage/MAM system.
With a complete portfolio of off-the-shelf apps and technology, plus an ‘interoperability lab’, where a library of third-party professional APIs and plug-ins is maintained, Marquis Broadcast has a largely unique ability to develop and deliver high quality and complex software integrations.
Many of Marquis Broadcast’s products have been recently upgraded, helping the company deliver its business-critical integration services. Postflux, for Adobe® Premiere® Pro, is a cutting-edge platform that improves the archiving, versioning, integrity, security, performance and sharing of Adobe Premiere projects in extended workflows. It is licenced by the number of users, with each user now able to login to the system using their own Google account.
Postflux addresses the fundamental issue of being able to confidently share Adobe Premiere projects, thereby mitigating risks, improving productivity and efficiency whilst enabling new extended workflows. It has now been updated to support additional project types, including Premiere Productions, plus supports multiple transfer engines, allowing the system to perform multiple simultaneous transfer tasks. When configured to use multiple servers, this greatly speeds up processing, delivering the same visible process for users but at much greater speeds.
Both Postflux for Adobe Premiere and Project Parking for Avid come with remote working features as standard. These features enable protection of work-in-progress and can externalise projects for remote working, allowing editing to continue in any location.
The latest versions of Marquis Broadcast’s Avid-certified Project Parking and Workspace Tools systems provide native support and full functionality with the new Avid OP1A workflows. They integrate with Avid NEXIS | Cloudspaces, accessed via the Avid connection client, letting you free up Avid NEXIS storage space and safely backup or park projects in the cloud. Avid NEXIS | Cloudspaces operates as though it’s another workspace on the local NEXIS system, making it simple for disaster recovery, workflow sync and backup to the cloud.
Project Parking can also be combined with secure low cost LTO, such as the XenData X1 archive appliance or Disk Archive Corporation storage, offering a powerful archiving system for Avid shared storage management. This combined system has a couple of key advantages: it enables archiving of old projects to LTO or cold-storage, useful when storage space on the NEXIS is running low, plus it can be used to backup projects, protecting against data loss due to a NEXIS crash. Project Parking provides analytics, archiving, visualisation and storage management and understands your entire Avid system, including the relationship between projects and media files. This allows intelligent management of both media and storage, whichever archive or backup storage solution you choose.
Marquis Broadcast’s Edit Bridge – which integrates Adobe Premiere Pro editors and After Effects artists within Avid Interplay PAM or Media Central Production Management environments – has been updated to support multiple Interplay connections, ideal when working within large broadcast systems. Improvements in the latest version include the ability to handle larger systems, with faster, more flexible searches across the Interplay PAM database. Adobe users have complete access to the Avid Interplay environment, with simple search, browse and publish panels providing users with greater flexibility in how they access Avid assets.
The digital workflow offered by Marquis Broadcast’s Medway middleware solution has been expanded to allow the Medway Engine Web Service (MEWS) to run in cloud compute services, hosted in Azure and AWS Cloud. Medway and MEWS offer a great way to integrate to legacy ground-based infrastructure using the large library of off-the-shelf API-based integrations, helping integrate professional cloud and ground workflows. MEWS enables in-cloud media processing and partial file retrieve, which improves egress speed and reduces data transfer costs, plus brings all the power and capability of Medway to the cloud. This hybrid cloud workflow enables relinking, integrating and archiving of Avid assets – both ground and hybrid cloud-based – especially useful when exchanging sequences between a main facility and remote editors.
Medway allows the export of Avid sequences from all Avid platforms without requiring them to be flattened/conformed in Avid. This allows generation of genealogy information on a sequence, describing the content used in a sequence before exporting and flattening to a single output file. This information is used by external MAMs, such as Levels Beyond’s Reach Engine media orchestration platform, to track asset usage and rights management. A new web-page-based Medway client has also been introduced, ideal for use by IT managers, allowing them to control and monitor transfer processes, rather than accessing via the Medway client.