Business

Prime Focus Technologies announced new features and advanced security enhancements of CLEAR to help customers embrace the virtual work environment during the current global
COVID-19 lockdown. “Empowering our customers to work from home, we have bolstered CLEAR with powerful security & ease-of-use features conducive to a remote, work from home environment,” said Ramki Sankaranarayanan, Founder/Global CEO, Prime Focus Technologies.

“As we battle COVID-19, we understand the concerns around business continuity. While this is an unprecedented challenge on all fronts, as your technology partner, our entire software team is working from home and continuing to support the usage of the CLEAR platform, globally.”

The brand-new features and functionalities include:

–Enhanced Security
New-generation HTML 5 player enabled with Hollywood-grade DRM encryption
Support for Just-In-Time (JIT) visual watermarking embedded within the stream for streaming through CLEAR as a secure alternative to generating watermarking on the client side

–Ease-of-Use
New Apple TV App – Our incredible new Apple TV app, custom-built for viewing content on TVs in a simple interface is innovatively designed for instant and secure access. Additionally, we’ve introduced Screener support to our Apple TV app to offer a seamless viewing experience to Executive Producers, Film Critics etc., in any remote location which makes it easy during the
COVID-19 times
New Folder admin – Extended folder administration to allow users to organize and manage their projects, eliminating any delays due to prior admin-driven process
Faster Download – Direct & faster download from S3 and Azure storage enabled, so vendors can quickly download files and perform assigned tasks
New UI experience – Launched a new light themed UI giving you an option to customize your UI experience and make work from home fun!
On-boarding partners – Clients can manage the Production Houses and Studios who provide content with ease now. They can now define the package structure, associate Shows and associate Users, with expiry dates, all from one UI
Powerful Admin Module enhancement with condensed permissions to easily handle custom user roles

–Content Acquisition
Activated a host of new functionalities to simplify content acquisition processes and reduce dependencies as much as possible:
Enhanced support for acquisition of content packages instead of individual files
Support extended to DPP-standardized content
Bulk QC – Review single asset and correct multiple copies, eliminating repetition
Vidchecker support for auto QC – Introducing a more robust acquisition process with new layers of checks including antivirus checks and auto-QC through Vidchecker

–Content Servicing
Introduced automation in content localization, to make it easier to perform and review tasks on CLEAR:
Subtitle tool inside CLEAR with the ability to create & review streaming-proxy-based subtitles to support work from home and freelance operations all around the world without having to download
CLEAR provides users with subtitle import capabilities to perform QC of vendor deliverables along with subtitle re time-coding, which allows customers to import transcript file and time-code quickly

–Content Distribution
PFT has quickly enabled on-demand cloud distribution on CLEAR leveraging the most commonly used cloud technologies:
Cloud transcode technologies support – Support for AWS Media Convert and Vantage
Standardised S3 delivery – Extended deliveries to S3, apart from Aspera, FTP/SFTP and Signiant
Extended flexibility in distribution, by allowing users to quickly generate new distribution profiles from an existing profile just by overriding certain profile attributes