At NAB 2016, Facilis (booth SL8811), Facilis, a leading international supplier of cost-effective, high performance shared storage solutions for collaborative media production networks, will announce the immediate availability of FastTracker, a new, integrated application for cataloging, searching and viewing any media within TerraBlock Shared Storage Systems. FastTracker offers the quickest way to find media, view it, and bring it directly into an editing application.
“This is just the right amount of media management for our workflow, because we didn't want to take away time from creating content to manage all of our data. We needed fast, intuitive search with the ability to instantly view what we’ve found, and immediately access that on our editing systems,” said Ira Klusendorf, video production manager at Steinhafels Inc., and beta user of FastTracker. “FastTracker has made us more productive. There’s no training required, it just does what you expect. I was surprised how easy it was to find a clip, and drop it into my project with no additional steps.”
With the ability to drag and drop media directly into the timeline or bin of popular editing applications like Avid’s Media Composer and Pro Tools, Apple FCPX and Adobe’s Premiere Pro CC, FastTracker excels at instant media access as well as tagging and searching custom catalogs which can be permissioned by user account. The FastTracker application is cross-platform, and clips can be indexed and cataloged from both Mac and PC workstations. Once clips are located, they can instantly be previewed by either a simple thumbnail scroll or played at full resolution in the integrated viewer.
Comprehensive playback support for production codecs and formats such as MOV, MP4, AVC, AVI, and MXF, along with DPX, EXR, PNG, TARGA still image and image sequences removes the guesswork when importing media files.
“It’s been said that up to 30% of edit suite time is spent searching for things. Our goal was to find the perfect balance between simple cataloging, search and access of media while specifically not interfering with existing workflows,” said James McKenna, VP of Marketing at Facilis. “FastTracker was designed to be always open – to work alongside the creative applications, not replace them.”
Because FastTracker is hosted on the TerraBlock server, there is no need to have an external client workstation in the shared environment for the purpose of media management. Periodic remote indexing can be assigned to the server itself, avoiding any loss of productivity on the client workstation. This removes the maintenance burden for other MAM systems where there is a requirement to keep the MAM and storage in sync as projects evolve.
“For no initial investment, FastTracker gives our users the kind of efficiency that is essential when working under deadlines. If you are making money with your MAM, then you can afford to spend money on your MAM. However, for those simply seeking to work faster, and manage terabytes of files more efficiently, FastTracker is the perfect tool,” added McKenna.
For customers currently on an eligible software support contract, the initial 5 seats of FastTracker will be available at no cost.
