After 15 years in broadcast technology doing demos of everything from Avid Xpress DV to the Sony F65 RAW recording unit's extension lead (it's so that you can put the camera on a gimble and keep the recorder in a helicopter) I did something completely new in 2020. I went and stood in a field, on an actual farm in order to demonstrate a broadcast workflow. This may be a world first. While 2020 was pretty dreadful as years go it did at least teach us all a lot about new ways of doing things. The reason I was in the field was to demonstrate a 4G camera-to-editorial workflow that didn't involve any wires at all. It was based on something Sony have built called XDCAM air.
Me. In a field. On a farm.
XDCAM air is a really interesting new integration for Glookast: for those who aren't familiar with it XDCAM air is basically a system for integrating cameras into workflows without any of those tedious cables or even media cards in the way. Sony have been building networking components into their cameras for a while now. Combined with the XDCAM air platform this means that clips, streams and more can be pushed to and from a camera while it's still in the field. The problem Glookast has solved is in getting from the Sony cloud platform into the production system you actually work in. It's actually a very simple workflow but has some pretty serious implications for how quickly it's possible to get a story out of a professional camera and out to an audience. Live is important and always will be but there's a big middle ground where it needs to be fast and file-based and that's what we've addressed here. There are a lot more possibilities and the file-based, proxy-first workflow we've developed is just the first of them. We at Glookast will be guided by customers in how they want to see this develop further and look forward to hearing about how it gets used.
Here you can find our hub page for the solution there's a demonstration video which is a great place to start on understanding what we can do already. It's important to note that we've done this demo moving files into an Avid environment but the same thing can be achieved into basically any platform Glookast can talk to (and that's basically all of them)
There's also a full technical white paper available with all the details.