Marquis Broadcast At NAB – Leading The Transition To Cloud

Like moths around a light, we're drawn to NAB. This year, over 100,000 'media moths' attended NAB but why? One thing is clear, it's much more than just another media conference and exhibition. As industry change continues to accelerate, the vendor-customer relationship is also becoming more nuanced. A new eco-structure of partnerships is evolving, often driven by customers wanting to do things that have simply never been done before – the most productive way to have these discussions is face-to-face.

It's also not a 'technology for technology's sake' gig either. One of the best events in and around NAB was the Devoncroft Executive Summit, which featured some insightful industry research and some great panel sessions too. Probably the best panel session was the 'Broadcaster C-Suite' with four CTOs representing Fox, Sinclair, Discovery and TVGlobo. We heard that with industry infrastructure utilisation standing at only 25%, there is a drive towards more remote production, moving transmission and production infrastructure to cloud, all of which significantly improves utilisation. Some compelling business cases are coming to the fore, and it's the role of companies such as Marquis to enable them.

The big US broadcast and media companies are leading the transition to cloud and are probably a year ahead of the rest of the world. The global reach of the US media enterprises means all the main geographies will be impacted by cloud adoption in the near future. So, not unsurprisingly, we have cloud-enabled our major products, which inherently improves both efficiency and infrastructure utilisation. Our 'extra-special sauce' is being able to easily bolt together hybrid cloud workflows with legacy infrastructure.

NAB 2018 was a great show for us; not only was booth traffic up but the quality of contacts was very high, with 50% of all visitors being new contacts. Every year, companies like ours count the cost of attending a major tradeshow like NAB and try to estimate its value. One thing is undeniable: that packing a lot of serious and detailed conversations about customer needs into such a brief period is incredibly valuable. We get direct feedback on our offerings and clear guidance about how well these meet prevalent customer needs. This year, they centred around collaboration and cloud working.

An example of this was Delta Parking, a feature of Project Parking. Delta Parking makes it possible to share an Avid project archive between multiple sites. By creating a cloud-based archive, other collaborators can securely access the encrypted project and media from remote locations. They can then modify the project and update the archive with a new version. The great thing is that, when uploading or downloading, we only transfer the new project metadata and any additional media – just the 'deltas', in other words. This resonated with customers who use freelancers and are actively looking for ways to share and protect Avid projects. One example was a post facility that was looking to share an edit in London with colour grading in New York.

We also showed two new products for the first time at NAB this year and both were very well received. The first was our Interplay Metadata Export Tool (IMET) that provides Avid Interplay PAM users with a way to export metadata from Interplay but in an easily-browsable and searchable format. Built for one of the large LA studios, who wanted to reduce the size of its Interplay database to improve performance, IMET exports selected folders of metadata to an internal website, which production staff can use to search and browse the metadata from projects whose media were archived several years ago. It's an ideal tool for anyone who has a large Interplay database, since scaling down will improve performance.

The second new product was Premiere Parking for Adobe Premiere Pro CC. This provides the ability to move an entire Adobe project to a new folder so that it can be easily transferred to a different location or tier of storage. It moves all the media referenced by the project together with all its sequences, and then the project itself, but modifying this so that it now refers to the new location. Premiere Parking makes Premiere Pro CC easily portable. Our Edit Bridge software makes it possible to edit Interplay content directly in Premiere Pro or After Effects.

For further information about Marquis Broadcast's range of professional broadcast and production workflow tools, please visit www.marquisbroadcast.com.

This article is also available in the May edition of Broadcast Film & Video.