The two companies worked closely with Avid and Sony, providing a high degree of automation to accelerate production whilst decreasing operational costs.
In news and production, there are always challenges. Overall production speed, complexities of editorial decision-making, high infrastructure costs, poor genealogy tracking and significant manual processes, to name just a few. There are also additional limiting factors, such as network speeds and storage costs. Using Sony’s clever acquisition tools (C3 Portal and compatible cameras), along with Avid’s production tools (Media Composer, MediaCentral and Edit on Demand), the new workflows – enabled by Marquis – ensure Wolftech planning data is maintained and enriched throughout the production process.
A new approach to metadata handling is a foundational step, such that news and productions become inherently structured from planning through to distribution. When assigning a Sony camera to a Wolftech news story or production, its planning data is pushed to each camera via the Sony C3 Portal, such that the metadata is fundamentally and uniquely bound to each recorded file. Until today, this powered the status and location tracking of the cameras, as well as the preview of the incoming media, right within Wolftech.
This new partnership takes it further by enabling Marquis to pass the planning data seamlessly through to Avid as part of the multi-resolution integration between Sony and Avid systems, enabling fast proxy editing in Avid and fast relinking to partial extraction of hi-res content. The hi-res partial extraction is a fully automatic process and can happen from the Sony C3 Portal, directly from the Sony camera or from copied camera cards.
When the relink is made, the proxy Avid timeline simply switches over to the hi-res version. The production acceleration is dramatic, especially when using 5G remote production for news or unscripted documentaries. In the case of unscripted documentaries with a high shooting ratio – say 200:1 – this workflow would save transferring 99.5% of high-resolution content.
The Wolftech planning data, including locations, descriptions, guest appearances and many other valuable keywords, is maintained and enriched throughout the production process, with Marquis automatically creating appropriate structures in MediaCentral. The richest set of metadata is preserved, plus genealogy and rights information can be maintained on a scene-by-scene basis. This is key to automating production workflows with a major benefit for downstream libraries and commercial exploitation.
Paul Glasgow, Marquis’ Managing Director, commented, “When we first met with Wolftech, it was clear that we had the opportunity to build out a partner infrastructure that would simplify, accelerate and remove risk from production workflows. The model is agile enough to cover almost all styles of production, from news and drama through to unscripted productions.”
Arne Berven, Wolftech CEO, commented, “As early adopters of camera to cloud workflows, we´ve always believed in the power of unlocking rich production metadata to drive actionable innovation across the diverse news and production supply chain. When it comes to Avid-based production workflows, Marquis made it look easy. It just works.”
For further information about Marquis or Wolftech, please visit their websites at marquisbroadcast.com. and wolftech.no.