Connections

LAS VEGAS — More than 50 MESA members exhibited during NAB. Here’s what a few of them had to share at the show.

Perforce

Ryan L’Italien, director of solutions for software application developer Perforce, was all smiles on the NAB Show floor.

While NAB was celebrating its centennial, it was the first year ever as an exhibitor for Perforce, and it simply couldn’t have been more of a success.

“This is a new event for us, and we’re really getting pulled into the world of media and entertainment,” L’Italien said. “Watching people react to what we offer, the ability to create content fast, share and collaborate with assets, they see it work in real time.”

Perforce was exhibiting as part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Accelerate Program and had listed its free Enhanced Studio Pack (ESP), its turnkey cloud solution for Helix Core, in the AWS Marketplace,

Helix Core is a universal repository, review, and versioning system that allows teams to accelerate collaboration at scale and is free for teams up to five. As part of the AWS Marketplace listing, the Perforce ESP had to pass the AWS Foundational Technical Review (FTR), where it was evaluated against a specific set of cloud-architecture best practices critical for customer success.

The feedback? Awesome.

“What we’ve heard is ‘we love Perforce, we need Perforce, it’s required for us now and we can’t operate without Perforce,’” L’Italien said.

During NAB, Perforce also announced the latest version of the Perfecto scriptless mobile testing automation tool. Perfecto Scriptless Mobile provides enterprise scale support for native mobile testing, making it an essential tool for those looking to improve their mobile testing efforts quickly and efficiently.

The latest enterprise version of Perfecto Scriptless Mobile provides teams with the ability to rapidly create and execute tests regardless of their level of coding knowledge and allows QA teams to easily build even the most complex test cases while increasing productivity for developers. Perfecto Scriptless Mobile is fully compatible with current Perfecto test automation features and integrates seamlessly into customers’ existing testing infrastructure.

Scriptless Mobile allows organizations to scale their testing efforts efficiently and effectively as their portfolio grows. With this new scalability, organizations can ensure that their mobile applications are tested thoroughly, reducing the risk of costly errors and defects.

Alteon

Alteon came into NAB with plenty if momentum, with the launch of a new Archive storage tier ($6 per month per terabyte), aimed at lower costs for content creators looking to keep their assets in one spot without breaking the bank.

The company also launched its new iOS app, giving users the ability upload videos and photos directly from an iPhone to Alteon’s secure collaborative cloud environment.

Alteon arguably came out of NAB with more hype than when it came in, after landing not one, but two top awards: the NAB Product of the Year award in the Management, Automation and Playout category, and TV Tech’s Best of Show award.

“These prestigious awards are a true honor that validate all the hard work the Alteon team has put in over the years,” said Alteon CEO and co-founder Matt Cimaglia, in a statement. “We are on a mission to democratize the media industry for content creators, and to be honored and recognized by our peers only confirms our vision for the future of the industry.

“As we continue innovating our product Alteon will remain ahead of the curve, because so many of us on the team come from a creative background and personally understand the problems we’re working to solve.”

Eric Trabb, NAB’s SVP and chief customer success officer, added: “Congratulations to Alteon.io for winning the 2023 NAB Show Product of the Year award in recognition of their cloud-based content ecosystem, a product that has demonstrated its ability to help storytellers face the challenges of the present and future by revolutionizing a critical stage of the content lifecycle.”

Not bad for a week in Vegas.

Adobe

Sure, the big news for Adobe at NAB was Adobe Firefly, a family of creative generative AI models that covers image generation and text effects for productions, pushing generative AI integrations directly into workflows. But Adobe senior director Paul Saccone was almost wistful talking about Adobe’s past, not the future.

Noting it’s been 30 years since Adobe After Effects was first used in a production, with the VFX team of Jurassic Park using the software to mesh aspects of 3D dinosaurs and 2D sketches together, Saccone reflected on just how far Adobe’s suite of products has come for media and entertainment.

“We continue to add a lot of little quality of life implementations people ask for,” he said. “A ton of Premiere Pro additions, more layers of protection to Frame.io, camera-to-cloud natively integrated in Fujifilm cameras.”

Adobe announced for NAB an expansion of its Frame.io’s video collaboration platform with photos and PDF documents, and shared that Frame.io now gives users an option for end-to-end workflow, from content capture to edit, review and approval via one centralized hub, thanks to camera-to-cloud native integrations with Fujifilm X-H2S and X-H2 cameras. The addition of forensic watermarking to Frame.io ups the security for the creative collaboration platform.

On the Premiere Pro side, there’s a host of new AI-powered innovations, including text-based editing, essentially making editing video as easy as copy-and-paste text, and automatic tone mapping, bringing consistent colors and contrast when mixing footage from different cameras.

And 30 years since After Effects first became a Hollywood must-have, the software now has a new context-sensitive properties panel for enhanced user productivity, more consistent color support, and performance optimizations, including quicker timeline layer selection and multi-frame rendering of shapes.

Over 400 global partners are delivering solutions for Adobe customers today, including chipmakers, camera makers, and technology providers. Don’t be surprised if that number continues to explode.

International Digital Centre

International Digital Centre currently supports more than 80 languages, covering a full spectrum of production and postproduction services, from QC and scripting, to localization and audio description, creative to digitizing.

And for company president and CEO Marcy Gilbert, she’s thinking the same thing as her peers: artificial intelligence and its many uses — from localization to captioning and subtitling — are going to make the lives of production and post firms a whole lot easier. And soon.

“Text-to-speech in real time, with the proper inflection and punctuation, it’s something we need to consider,” she said. “There’s a major need in our industry to minimize the time we work on [localization].” But concerns remain that the technology isn’t quite there yet when compared to what actual human talent can provide. That was a common theme among localization players at NAB. Another was praise for partners, with Gilbert singling out partner OOONA, which has been IDC’s platform of choice for end-to-end localization workflows for three years now.

Gilbert praised OOONA and its ability to offer a secure way for IDC’s transcribers and translators to work together on a wide range of products, no matter where they are in the world. “Every day they make it a little easier for us to get things done,” she said.

Lastly, Gilbert touted the work of her company’s L.A. office, which has become a top player in the creative services and color correction departments.

Gracenote

For Trent Wheeler, chief product officer for Gracenote, the decision for the content solutions business unit of Nielsen to join the board of the Entertainment ID Registry (EIDR) was an easy one.

“It made sense since so many of our clients are part of EIDR,” Wheeler said. “EIDR has a strong presence in the studio space, and we have a great global footprint. We’re all trying to solve the same problems in distribution, and we can work with EIDR to solve some of these problems.”

Namely, the two are partnering on new ways to help the industry improve workflow efficiencies via automation, make for better program discoverability, and optimize owners’ return on content investment.

“I am thrilled to extend a very warm welcome to Gracenote as they join the EIDR Board,” said Hollie Choi, managing director of EIDR, when the announcement was made. “Gracenote and EIDR share in the mission to improve the accuracy and efficiency of content management and distribution for the media and entertainment industry. I’m looking forward to finding ways for our two organizations to work together on our common goals.”

Outside of the EIDR announcement, Wheeler said Gracenote was at NAB promoting its addition of rich data sets for millions of pieces of available content, and the quick success of its Inclusion Analytics solution, which recently added new disability representation data to the gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation information of talent that’s already being tracked.