LOS ANGELES—My entertainment team at Fullscreen is responsible for creating social media content for our TV and entertainment clients. My team consists of creative producers, account managers, graphic designers, animators and video editors, like myself. Our clients send us TV episodes, and from that we create social media content ranging from animated gifs to video clips to build fan awareness on the social channels for that series.
As our team started handling more video content, we were faced with a new technical challenge—an emerging need for proxy files that preserved the audio of the source file. We reached out to Sony and learned their Ci solution could automatically transcode proxy files at the time of upload. We provided our specifications and Sony’s Ci team was able to produce the custom transcode we needed for every file uploaded to Ci.
SHAVES OFF TRANSFER TIMES
Sony also offered built-in Aspera integration which allowed our Account team to accelerate uploading when dealing with the large source files from clients. Fullscreen has an office in Playa Vista, Ca., but like most of our team, I usually work from home in Los Angeles while my account manager is in New York. We all rely on our home internet connection and online communication to work. When our clients send us 70 GB files, the tools we used in the past would force us to download whole files to our desktop—taking time and hard drive space. In our fast-paced weekly TV workflow, being able to use Ci with Aspera Connect coupled with the availability of smaller transcode files really helps us shave off file transfer times and local storage requirements.
The other feature that intrigued us was Ci’s RoughCut application—the feature I use the most. Once footage is uploaded to our Ci Workspace, the Accounts team gives me the basic timecodes and a direct link to the episode file in Ci. I can download the full episode but often I open Ci’s RoughCut application and start clipping timecodes in order to download a shorter clip. Using RoughCut allows me to quickly download a small three-minute clip assembly of the timecodes I need instead of a full 40-minute episode, which I then import into Premiere or After Effects for editing.
While a lot of requests come with guidelines and a storyboard, having access to the full source footage gives more creative freedom to me as an editor to create a more powerful cut. Whether you’re an animator or an editor, anybody who works as a technical creative will be very familiar with Roughcut.
Across Fullscreen, we have 12-14 Workspaces categorized by various teams and the Workspaces are set up in folder structures based on clients. On my first day of using Ci, it only took 10 minutes for me to learn how the the Workspaces were organized and how to use the features like RoughCut.
Ci makes my workflow a lot easier and not having to download full episodes saves a lot of time and space on my hard drive. It’s a useful step in our weekly episodic workflow that I enjoy using every week, and even find myself telling other people on my team about Ci.
At Fullscreen, Britne Goldstein creates social media content for top entertainment clients. She can be reached atbritne.goldstein@fullscreenmedia.com.
For more information, please visitwww.sonymcs.comor call 800-538-7550.
