THE EVERCAST PLATFORM (USED ABOVE) COMBINES HD LIVE STREAMING WITH SUPER-LOW-LATENCY VIDEO CONFERENCING... “TO EMPOWER IDEATION TO FLOW UNCONSTRAINED BY TIME OR BORDERS,” ACCORDING TO FOUNDER ROGER BARTON, ACE.
Most recently, Avid inked a new five-year strategic alliance agreement with Microsoft Azure. Avid offers a scalable and secure Avid | Edit On-Demand virtualized production environment that includes its Avid Media Composer editing software and Avid NEXIS storage. Avid Chief Executive/President Jeff Rosica says, “Building on the lessons learned during this pandemic, the companies are well prepared for what we believe will be an accelerated pace of cloud adoption.” Evercast is a remote collaboration platform that combines HD live streaming with super-low-latency video conferencing and other special features “to empower ideation to flow unconstrained by time or borders.” In other words, it’s designed for creatives by a creative. Barton says his company is “constantly looking at how to improve the technology and evolve the offering, as use cases are rapidly expanding across the production cycle.” Recent updates include a hotkey that, similar to a push-totalk microphone, allows for quick muting/ unmuting of the microphone when streaming so it doesn’t pick up any audio coming from the speakers. Also new is the ability to hide
video-conferencing thumbnails when viewing stream content, which “dramatically reduces CPU stress when working on less powerful machines.” Evercast will also get a new user interface in the fall.
Cloud/Streaming Solutions There are a lot of solutions for facilities that want to move their operations to the cloud. Some of them provide plug-and-play ecosystems customized to a client’s specific needs; others are building blocks in a cloud ecosystem. Here are some – but not all – of those cloud providers, in alphabetical order. Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage offers affordable cloud storage with data protection, archiving, and content storage with instant availability, at $5 per terabyte per month. Recently, Aiden Korotkin transitioned from freelancing to his own video production company, AK Productions. His data was in a public cloud, but he wanted a simpler system that was still secure. Backblaze helped Korotkin migrate 12 TB, out of a total of 40 TB, in less than a day. (The rest was backed up in
real time.) He notes that Backblaze’s simple interface has reduced the time he had spent managing data backup. He also relied on cloud migration company Flexify.IO to move his data to Technicolor’s TechStream (see below). Flexify.IO is a storage virtualization and data migration solution that offers multicloud (i.e. cloud agnostic) storage, S3-to-Azure API translation, and data migration between cloud services. BeBop Technology provides software that utilizes public data centers to create a seamless, secure ecosystem for remote collaboration and includes virtualized remote workstations. “The zero client is the bridge that displays what’s in the cloud,” explains director of business development Michael Kammes. BeBop Technology’s software also provides industry-standard tools, including Adobe Creative Cloud applications; Foundry products, including Nuke; Autodesk software, including Maya; and other VFX, titling, design, 3D-modeling, and animation tools. BeBop Rocket provides seamless automated file movement to-and-from on-premises, for onboarding existing workflows and projects into the cloud. BeBop will also work with a
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