Blue Lucy Wins A BAFTA... Project

Blue Lucy has announced that the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) is using the Blue Lucy Asset Manager (BLAM) to manage their content archive and streamline content production workflows. The software is hosted entirely in Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts is an independent, internationally recognised charity that supports, develops and promotes the art forms of the moving image by identifying and rewarding excellence, inspiring practitioners and benefiting the public.

In addition to its awards ceremonies, BAFTA has a year-round, international programme of learning events and initiatives that offer unique access to some of the world's most inspiring talent through workshops, masterclasses, scholarships, lectures and mentoring schemes, connecting with audiences of all ages and backgrounds across the UK,US and East Asia.

As well as covering BAFTA events, the in-house production team also produce online learning resources for people interested in pursuing a career in film, TV or gaming, adding over a terabyte of new content per month to the existing digital and tape-based archives. Prior to implementing the BLAM, the team were working from portable hard drives, on-premise RAID arrays, and were using Excel spreadsheets to manage their data. They were looking for a more robust, secure, organised way of managing their media and associated metadata when they discovered Blue Lucy and the BLAM at IBC.

The BLAM was selected to fulfil two key project objectives:
• Bring the large, historic media collections under secure management to enable curation, ease of discovery and provide long term secure storage.
• Streamline the rushes workflow to speed up the edit process and make best use of all content captured at BAFTA events.

BAFTA, like other media organisations, has been transitioning to cloud computing for archival storage, which offers greater security and resilience than typical IT infrastructures.

As Rosie Wilson, BAFTA media manager, said: "We were looking for a media asset management (MAM) system that was versatile enough to handle some of the production team's workflows as well as meet archival requirements, and in a purely cloud-based environment.

"With offices around the world it was important to find a system that would allow for global access, plus the ability to scale and integrate with other systems, including the potential to link with BAFTA's own cloud-based media management service, BAFTA Electron. The Blue Lucy team's experience in the broadcast sector and flexible, can-do approach convinced us to implement the BLAM."

Key functionality that the BLAM provides for BAFTA includes:
• Management of three tiers of AWS storage: S3, Glacier and a small EC2 disc based storage volume.
• Automated upload of existing video content to S3 storage and creation of proxies available via the browser-based interface.
• Operations management through automated and user tasks for adding metadata and curating content into collections.
• Content sharing and distribution with the ability to transcode archived material to a range of house, edit and distribute formats.
• Deep archiving in Glacier according to a rules-based workflow that tracks when an asset was last accessed on S3.
• Post-production workflow management for new content, including automated ingest, proxy creation, in-system and email notifications and cut-and-splice capability through the Blue Lucy Tailor plug-in.

Blue Lucy founder, Julian Wright, said: "We are very proud that BLAM was chosen to support this important initiative for BAFTA. No other organisation embodies the importance and history of the art of the moving image. The web-browser based, simple to use and operationally focused nature of BLAM make it a perfect fit for BAFTA's business needs. A cloud-based deployment, which is supported operationally and technically by Blue Lucy, allows BAFTA to carry out their media operations securely without needing to concern themselves with technology."

bluelucy.com

(MH)