TNW at IBC: Aframe’s CTO Tim Burton on video production in the cloud

You may have heard the rumours, TNW is at the International Broadcast Convention (IBC) in Amsterdam talking to innovators and creators of the future of radio and television. Through a partnership with LiveU we are streaming a set of interviews throughout the event.

Aframe is a cloud-based video asset management system built with production people in mind. It was designed from scratch to deal with content straight from the camera to cope with access, production and storage.

Challenges in this field include moving huge amounts of data and so Aframe has worked on storage solutions so that files can be saved in the format they are created in and without compression.

At IBC Aframe announced a partnership with Panasonic with a focus on audio workflows. Aframe CTO Tim Burton (not that one) says, “Panasonic has a new fleet of cameras with really good production-useful proxies within the actual camera. With the high quality proxies work with uncompressed audio which is golden when you’re dealing with an audio workflow. We’re providing the ability to pull the proxy out of the camera without removing the card and then on set, producers can upload to Aframe before it’s even finished writing to the card.”

The genesis for Aframe was that people can be walking around with huge amounts of work on a separate storage device. Instead of having to search and catalogue material on that device and upload it each time it needs to be shared, working in the cloud provides access, encryption and copies on different sites to ensure that users can always get to their material.

In order to secure the material, Afram encrypts everything that is sent through its system. “While we have some private infrastructure we are leveraging the public Internet,” says Burton. “That means not just video itself, but the comments and metadata. So all of our traffic has to be encrypted.”

Check out the video below where Burton describes how Aframe helps its customers share access to footage, especially in areas where more than one company is involved in a production.

Over the coming days we’ll bring you more from IBC and find out how the Internet is changing television. Through LiveU, we’ll be streaming live video throughout the days as well as posting video chats about the future of TV and radio. You can find all of our IBC coverage here.