Company looking to expand from its grading software Baselight

Filmlight Nara

Filmlight has launched Nara, a media access, streaming and indexing tool.

Best known for the Baselight grading software, Filmlight moves into media access with this solution. It is able to natively decode and play back a wide selection of media without the need to transcode to proxy files, and includes a streaming engine and advanced indexing system. Users can see each file presented with a thumbnail and associated metadata on the web-based service.

Key features include: a web UI, mirroring the facility’s security protocols; colour accurate streaming; a back-end index; and codec support (including RAW camera formats, intermediate formats like EXR, as well as IMF, DCP and other complex deliverables).

For indexing, users can search via timecode, lens, codec, colour space, encoding, resolution, and more, as well as view, copy and share metadata information with other team members.

Nara can be deployed on a facilities network storage in the data centre or in the cloud, and it is scalable and available as a turnkey solution.

Sam Lempp, Nara’s head of business development, said: “Nara truly connects creative teams. From editors, colourists, VFX artists, cinematographers and directors to clients and marketing managers, Nara speeds up and simplifies collaborative tasks such as progress reviews, approval and compliance processes –allowing creatives to focus on what they do best.”

He added, “Many solutions today necessitate multiple product solutions, with various subscriptions, hardware requirements and integration periods. Nara streamlines this offering, making it easy to integrate and simpler to manage. And it’s accessible to all – not just Baselight customers.”

Molinare is one post house that was part of the beta programme, and CTO Darren Woolfson said: “The secure environment in which our media exists can create challenges for wider members of the team trying to view, check and listen to content. Identifying the correct asset can also be time consuming and finding a player to playback the asset’s codec, converted to the correct viewing colour space, can be difficult.

“Nara’s background indexing along with its familiar user interface allows us to find media quickly. We can simply navigate through directories or create advanced searches based on media metadata. Once found, pretty much any file format can be securely viewed in the correct colour space from a web browser almost immediately.”