WESTFORD, MASS. and LONDON—Australia’s Nine Network is transcoding with Aframe technology, the vendor said. Aframe said it took the task of transcoding Nine’s promos off of existing systems, automated processes and enabled same-day, after-hours review of high-quality files on a range of devices.
Nine’s promo team produces an average of 300 promos daily, many of them requiring after-hours approval by producers and network executives.
“Prior to adopting Aframe, our process was to export QuickTime reference files of finished promos from our post production system manually and have an edit coordinator park on a system to transcode them to H.264.mp4 and WMV files that were small enough to email, then send them out to each reviewer,” said Dylan Van Dyke, Nine technology operations support manager. “The impact on our transcoders was becoming a problem. We ingest a terabyte of data daily just to work on the content. Using transcoders to compress promos for review put pressure on that.”
On the other side, upon receiving emails after they’d left the facility, executives and producers found video files that sometimes weren’t of adequate quality to pick up detail, and struggled to make meaningful notes without having accurate timecode references. If they were on a device that didn’t support the file format, they had to make their way to something that did, or wait until the morning when they were back in the office.
To address these challenges, Nine Network implemented Aframe’s video Review & Approval technology, setting up a workflow in which editors can export OP1a MXF files that are placed automatically into a shared folder that both Aframe and Nine’s transcode system watch. Aframe picks up the high-res export and creates an H.264 proxy that is playable on a variety of devices—PC, Android, Mac, etc., and creates a collection of promos or a single promo for review. Reviewers can play the file and approve or reject the promo and provide feedback securely. Since the file is an exact proxy of the original, it is timecode accurate.
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