Colorfront to Show Advances in Cloud Services at NAB 2014

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Thu, 02/20/2014 - 14:55 -- Nick Dager

Colorfront will demonstrate advances in its Colorfront Cloud Services at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas in April.

Announced in October last year, Colorfront Cloud Services enable streamlined distributed post-production, and have been developed by Colorfront in collaboration with leading Hollywood studios and post-production facilities. Colorfront is now also working with leading broadcasters and content producers in the UK, Europe, Japan, Brazil and the US, as they adopt large-sensor cameras for Ultra HD production.

Colorfront Cloud Services combine core elements of Colorfront’s Transkoder engine technology, which is optimized for use on flexible, high-performance, cloud-based computing options.

The company demonstrated faster than real time remote upload and processing of ProRes 4444 Arri Alexa television footage, during Colorfront’s Supersession User-Group in Los Angeles last November. In December, the company successfully demonstrated real time, digital cinema quality, 4K JPEG2000 playback directly from Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) public cloud storage to a 4K DCI cinema projector, at the CineGrid Convention in San Diego.

Most recently, Colorfront Cloud Services successfully rendered several hours of original 4K RAW camera footage to a range of broadcast deliverable formats, via Amazon Web Services’ GPU-enabled servers running Transkoder engine.

Colorfront will reprise all of these advances, plus new cloud-based EDL conforming and automatic visual effects pull capabilities, during NAB 2014, April 7-10. 

“Colorfront Cloud Services is advancing rapidly, and the results are astonishing,” said Bill Feightner CTO of Colorfront. “We have uploaded 4K material to secure cloud servers in Ireland and achieved real time playback in Budapest. The same speeds and capabilities are also available across the US, enabling fast access to production media securely from multiple locations. This great news for motion picture producers, and leading broadcasters are also now evaluating how Colorfront Cloud Services can be optimized for broadcast deliverables from the latest large sensor digital cinematography cameras manufactured by ARRI, Sony, Red and Canon.”

Colorfront Cloud Services can be implemented in several flexible ways. Users have the choice of basing their service around Colorfront’s own secure cloud service in Los Angeles, a preferred private data center or facility house, or a range of public, cloud-based servers, such as Amazon Web Services.

Encryption provides security of all production media. Users can securely upload original camera footage, and associated metadata, to a choice of cloud servers, and perform and automate a range of key tasks. Initial services offered include dailies transcoding, deliverables rendering, EDL auto-conforming and VFX pulls.

Colorfront has already achieved considerable success in motion picture and high-end episodic TV, with its Primetime Emmy Award-winning On-Set Dailies and Express Dailies systems, which share many Transkoder’s key technologies. The 2014 Oscar-nominated movies Nebraska, Captain Phillips, Gravity, Prisoners, Rush and The Wolf of Wall Street, along with hit TV series Dracula, True Blood, Strike Back and Mad Men have all utilized Colorfront systems.

Colorfront www.colorfront.com