Sponsored: Broadcast Tech looks at how FilmLight has expanded its media access tool into a wider platform
“The big issue is subscriber fatigue.”
Sam Lempp, head of business development for Nara at FilmLight, believes the industry may be hitting a point of saturation. The rise of cloud services has brought a great many benefits, but at the same time it has led to costs in terms of both tools and storage.
While post houses have seen the number of subscriptions to various services rise, Lempp is keen to help the industry go the other way. “We want to give people something that solves more than one problem.”
This is evident in the number of new features added to media access, streaming and indexing platform Nara. Users are now able to use advanced analytics tools, real-time transcoding capabilities, a smart new project management feature and tools for real-time notes and comments for collaboration across teams and departments.
The analytics provide a detailed overview of users’ systems, surfacing insights such as directory size, file age, volume capacity, and storage distribution by file type, which Lempp says gives facilities, “more autonomy,” over how their storage is being used and eases searchability.
Another new feature is Secure Client Review, which lets users stream media directly to clients, combining enterprise-grade encryption and access controls to protect sensitive content with perfect colour reproduction and frame-accurate playback. Users can also leave time-coded notes and comments directly on the media.
Project Management also comes to Nara, with a unified view across all storage locations for searching and accessing media, granular access levels for admins to assign, and custom workflows.
The Nara render engine, built directly from Baselight’s mature and proven renderer , can export to over 160 codecs and formats, including web-optimised files, broadcast-ready formats, or specialised codecs. As a result, Lempp sees a future where VFX houses pull their files themselves rather than waiting for delivery.
All of this can be done in the cloud, or, for those companies hoping to avoid the issue of doubling up storage across on-prem and the cloud, through existing hardware at their facilities. Overall, the “key theme is working more efficiently.”
In addition, Nara doesn’t need to be used in conjunction with Baselight, although users can now interact with colourists in Baselight projects in real-time, and Lempp reveals that Resolve facilities and VFX companies are also using this tech. He says , “Nara does not rely on Baselight. It works very well with Baselight, but it’s not prerequisite and we’re looking to roll out integrations with other NLEs in the near future.”
The plethora of new tools aims to reflect the increased merging of roles across post, with smaller teams having to take on a wider range of tasks. In particular, Lempp mentions that, “some facilities we work with have edit producers, combining post-producers and edit assistants. People are doing multiple jobs and jumping between different software and servers.”
Plenty more is in the pipeline for Nara, including further integrations and a broadening tool set, all based on feedback from the industry, which Lempp is happy to announce is, “pretty vocal!”. More is expected at IBC later this year, where FilmLight has returned to the show floor in Hall 6, stand C19.
