Archive of the Remote Collaboration Category

As HBO’s Christian Wilson urged me to do on Sunday, I stopped by the Aspera booth (SU15509) this morning to learn more about that company’s high-speed file transfer software suite. I was fortunate to run into Michelle Munson, Aspera’s president and co-founder, while I was there, and she filled me in on the company’s story.

While the technical explanation of how Aspera’s “fasp 2.0″ software suite addresses the twin issues of speed and ultra-security for major entertainment clients like HBO, Technicolor, Ascent Media, EFilm, and many others–most of whom are building Aspera, one way or another, into their larger digital asset management suite of tools–is interesting and important, I was most struck by another part of the story Munson addressed. more

After years of hearing about it, we’ve learned that we at least aught to be open to using metadata, even if we’re not too clear about what it is or where it fits in with our day-to-day work life.

At the show, a number of new and upgraded products are making us think we better get with the program.

GridIron Software’s GridIron Flow offers a pretty slick solution. Due to hit public beta in a few months, it still managed to win a Best of Show at Macworld 2008. It’s digital content management software for those working on graphic design, web, and video projects. The software (Mac and PC) tracks the design process by creating a graphic image file to represent the relationship between the software on a computer and the files that software creates. more

Just visited with Maximum Throughput, or Max T to the fans of this savvy Montreal-based company. Well-regarded for its Sledgehammer high-speed NAS (network attached storage) gear, Max T is moving to offer server-based editing. Its MAXedit Server, configured to allow many seats of workgroup editing right out of the box, is joined by the real winner for me: MAXedit Web Edition, a web-based editing service due to launch in the 3rd quarter of this year.

“Unlike some Flash-based web editing offerings, MAXedit is totally secure,” says Maher Khatib, vp of engineering at Max T. Their web-based product, just as speedy in offering real-time playback of resolutions up to HD over standard Internet connections, uses Java instead, which was developed by Sun Microsystems as a secure server-based media format. more

I had an interesting chat at the Digital Cinema Summit yesterday with Christian Wilson, manager of HBO Studios West. Christian and I last spoke in August 2006 when I penned an article about HBO’s workflow for remote-editing and collaboration on the mini-series Rome–shot in Rome, and edited in Los Angeles over a highly secure VPN network. Christian points out that, like many other technology advances, in less than two years, that type of workflow, including ultra-high security, which is extremely important to networks like HBO, has advanced greatly.

HBO can now share high-resolution, exact-source frame rate and image sized files and make final decisions about those images long-distance using improved versions of the Rome-style workflow, he says. Among the shows being produced remotely in this manner by HBO right now are Generation Kill, which is being shot in South Africa, and Pacific, which is being shot in Australia. In both cases, the backbone is high-speed data transfer via the Sohonet private network system, with secure encrypted files managed by Aspera high-speed file transfer software, among other bells and whistles. more