Pronology, a developer of tapeless workflow solutions, will showcase its full range of digital asset management tools at the 2014 IBC Show (Hall 10, Stand A26). The Pronology suite simplifies the task of content creation and distribution for today’s tapeless workflows.
“Pronology was built upon our industry experience, which has allowed us to provide a flexible solution to accommodate the wide range of potential workflows that exist in today’s production environments,” said Mike Shore, co-founder of Pronology. “We are eager to expand our outreach to industry professionals and specifically to the European market, as we feel they can benefit from the features of our easy-to-use, collaborative, Web-based environment.”
Pronology provides users the option of working in the cloud, via an internal intranet or a secure Pronology-hosted network. By utilizing a standard Web-browser as its primary interface, Pronology allows a limitless number of users to perform multiple functions simultaneously and remotely.
Pronology’s custom-designed, hardware-agnostic ingest-control application can directly manage recording devices from industry leading manufacturers. In addition to giving users a single interface for starting and stopping multiple recordings, it also facilitates the entry of organizational metadata prior to and during ingest. This same information is used throughout the Pronology system, offering clear communication about a recording and its significance. This enables users to organize their content at the beginning of the process, minimizing human error. The system also includes a fully integrated transcode engine. Users can create proxies from imported material, or “normalize” all of their in-bound assets to a house format, all without the need to license and configure external transcoding software.
As part of the browser-based interface, users have instant access to a live Web proxy of the video and audio feeds being captured by the production’s record operation. These feeds can be logged instantly and time-coded accurately by multiple users, regardless of their physical location. User comments and log entries are immediately visible to all other (authorized) users, and can be associated with just one recording, or all recordings within a group. The log entries can be imported into an NLE environment and associated to the recordings as “locators.” As these entries are relevant to the high-, edit- and Web-proxy resolutions of the content, the editorial coordination between off- and on-line is greatly simplified. Pronology’s intuitive sub-clipping tool also allows users to select their ideal shots, and to sub-clip content into customizable bins for ease of organization and clear communication to the edit room.
Along with logging and sub-clipping, producers have the option to use the Web proxies to create a storyboard or “paper” cut of their projects. They can simply drag and drop the selected clips into a storyboard and send this as a “sequence” to their editor. Since these sequences can be associated to any resolution of a recording, the editor can load the Pronology storyboard into their NLE and link to the appropriate resolution for on- or off-line work. Pronology supports a range of NLE systems, including Avid, Adobe and Apple.
To manage project approval, Pronology enables post-production staff to e-mail a link to one or a group of producers/clients seeking comments and editorial authorization for recorded and edited content. This link is completely encrypted, allowing for off-site viewing while maintaining content security. Each link view is tracked in real time, showing the recipient time-stamped data for previews and approvals by each user. For added security, senders can specify a link’s “kill” date and require a login to view material.
As an extension of its approval functionality, Pronology also offers Web video hosting and advanced content-delivery services, including multi-platform distribution and VOD delivery for clients looking to monetize their content on the “other” screens.
And Pronology includes a complete archive solution. Imported and/or recorded content and its associated metadata can be preserved to both LTO data tape as well as to the cloud. Users have the option to control a single LTO tape drive or a multi-drive robot to create an open-standard LTFS-formatted backup manually or automatically. This gives users the ability to create full or partial restores of media directly from their browser. Included in the complete Pronology offering is the ability to extend all of the archive functionality to a cloud-based option.
