M+E Daily

LAS VEGAS — Post-pandemic, the 2023 edition of the NAB Show felt like the first one where absolutely everyone was back. That included more than 50 member companies of the MESA community, who brought their best to the Las Vegas Convention Center. Here’s a look at what a few of them had to share.

Sohonet

Following its major acquisition news last month, picking up near-time dailies review and production asset management platform firm 5th Kind, Sohonet came ready to share what’s next at NAB, introducing ClearView Rush and Sohonet Storylink, the rebranded 5th Kind CORE solutions that add Sohonet’s real-time remote collaboration technology and media network to 5th Kind’s technologies.

ClearView Rush aims to give filmmakers the ability to review content from set, allowing them to review dailies, add mark-ups and make creative decisions using a secure tool built with creatives in mind, allowing them to keep pace with their production schedule.

Meanwhile, Sohonet Storylink is “an asset management tool designed with creatives for creatives,” the company announced.

From simplifying asset organisation to accelerating approval, Storylink presents one platform that easily and efficiently adapts to the filmmaker’s production workflow.

Storylink’s scalability lets creative executives working across multiple productions to stay up to speed with the fast-paced changes that the production workflows require to stay on target.

Visit sohonet.com/5thkind-sohonet/ for more information.

Coresite

Hybrid IT solutions provider CoreSite unveiled at NAB new, enhanced network services to its software-defined networking platform, the Open Cloud Exchange (OCX).

The new services now automate additional provisioning functionality within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and direct cloud-to-cloud communication capabilities on CoreSite’s virtual routers.

The OCX enables secure, low latency connectivity among the company’s data centres, cloud providers and digital ecosystem needed to reach new markets, rapidly scale on-demand, reduce total cost of operation (TCO) and accelerate IT modernisation, the company said.

A new Layer 3 connection to OCI, available through the OCX, provides 1 Gbps bandwidth for customers, with 10 Gbps expected in the future. CoreSite customers now have more options to deploy multi-cloud and hybrid cloud architectures.

“Since introducing the Open Cloud Exchange over a decade ago, CoreSite has continually invested in building out the platform to support modern use cases in the age of digitisation,” said Matt Senderhauf, VP of interconnection strategy for CoreSite. “The OCX makes it easy for customers to deploy a high-performance hybrid architecture and meet their ever-changing, critical IT infrastructure requirements.”

CoreSite customers can now access Oracle Cloud Regions in Chicago, Ashburn, and Phoenix from all CoreSite data centres.

Alteon.io

With hourly presentations from industry experts, constant demos of modern content workflows, and a steady stream of partners, media and clients, the large North Hall booth of Alteon and its co-founder and CEO Matt Cimaglia held a steady buzz during the NAB Show.

Not bad at all for just the second NAB Show for the company.

“We’ve seen a lot of growth since our first NAB last year, and we took to heart what we heard from people regarding our product during our first year,” Cimaglia said. “What’s really helped us is our user base. Oftentimes you see newer companies get shut down because they don’t listen to their users, and we have a lot of power behind us. Our users have helped us grow our platform.”

Alteon’s offerings run the gamut in the content creation space, with tools aimed at bridging tech gaps and simplifying content creation. From Alteon Cloud, a CMS that combines a variety pf storage tiers with extensive tagging and commenting power, to the IBM Aspera-powered desktop uploader Alteon Accelerator, to Alteon Transcoder, which automatically generates proxies of video files (now including Blackmagic RAW) natively in the cloud during upload, there was indeed much to see at the booth.

Earlier this year, Alteon launched its new iOS app for iPhone creators to upload media directly to Alteon Cloud, and previously, Alteon debuted a workflow extension for Final Cut Pro.

Veritone

Enterprise AI software and services firm Veritone brought generative AI and monetisation solutions that span the entire content lifecycle to the show, touting the significant role AI plays in content creation.

Veritone’s aiWARE™ platform is widely deployed by customers in the media, entertainment, sports, human resources, government and public sectors. As a core pillar of aiWARE, Veritone Generative AI is an enterprise-grade Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that natively supports and orchestrates public large language models — such as GPT-3 and ChatGPT — as well as domain-specific large language models. Its robust capabilities are available natively via API and Veritone’s low-code workflow application, Automate Studio. It will also be seamlessly integrated with Veritone’s industry-specific applications. Veritone Generative AI is being leveraged in client data, media and communication workflows across several business segments today, building upon and extending Veritone’s current integrated cognition, conversational AI, and other robust AI/ML offerings.

In addition to its current large language model support, Veritone plans to also natively support expanded generative AI models for image and video generation, such as DALL-E and other prompt-to-image and video models, through aiWARE, in the second quarter of 2023.

To learn more about Veritone Generative AI, see demos, and view best practices, please visit www.veritone.com/generativeAI.

Adobe

Ahead of this week’s NAB annual conference, Adobe announced new innovations, including Text-Based Editing and Automated Color Tone-Mapping in Adobe Premiere Pro and celebrated 30 years of Adobe After Effects.

Adobe also expanded Frame.io to enable photography and PDF document reviews, giving decentralised marketing teams a unified and intuitive cloud hub for collaborating on assets.

New Text Based Editing in Adobe Premiere

For more than three decades, Adobe’s family of video and audio apps have been the tools-of-choice for the worlds’ most talented creative pros. This year alone our applications helped bring to life 10 Oscar-nominated films, including the winner for Best Picture and Best Editing, “Everything Everywhere All At Once.” The creators behind Adobe Substance 3D Designer earned a Scientific Technical Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences® (Adobe’s third Oscar), and nearly two thirds of movies shown at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival were edited in Premiere Pro.

Bringing Generative AI to Creative Cloud with Adobe Firefly

Over more than 10 years, Adobe has delivered hundreds of AI-driven features through Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s AI and machine learning framework. Features like Auto Reframe and Remix in Premiere Pro and Content Aware Fill for Video in After Effects are already helping video and audio professionals around the world create stunning content at high velocity.

Adobe are entering a new era where generative AI will enable a natural conversation between creator and computer — where typing in your own words and simple gestures will combine with the best of professional creative application workflows to enable new creative expression.

Last month Adobe announced Adobe Firefly, the next major evolution of AI-driven creativity and productivity.

Firefly is the family of creative generative AI models, starting with image generation and text effects. The first model, trained on Adobe Stock images, openly licensed content, and public domain content where copyright has expired, is designed to generate content safe for commercial use. Firefly is now available in beta (try it out!).

At NAB, Adobe are expanding the vision for Firefly to imagine ways we can bring generative AI into Adobe’s video, audio, animation and motion graphics design apps.

Imagining Adobe Firefly for video

Adobe are excited to invent and innovate with the video and audio community to make it easier and faster for you to transform your vision into reality. With Firefly as a creative co-pilot, you can supercharge your discovery and ideation processes and cut post-production time from days to minutes. And with generative AI integrated directly into your workflows, these powerful new capabilities will be right at your fingertips. Imagine the power to instantly change the time of day of a video, automatically annotate and find relevant b-roll, or create limitless variations of clips — all as a starting point of your creativity.

To start, Adobe is exploring a range of concepts, including:

–Text to colour enhancements: Change colour schemes, time of day, or even the seasons in already-recorded videos, instantly altering the mood and setting to evoke a specific tone and feel. With a simple prompt like “Make this scene feel warm and inviting,” the time between imagination and final product can all but disappear.

–Advanced music and sound effects: Creators can easily generate royalty-free custom sounds and music to reflect a certain feeling or scene for both temporary and final tracks.
Stunning fonts, text effects, graphics, and logos: With a few simple words and in a matter of minutes, creators can generate subtitles, logos and title cards and custom contextual animations.

–Powerful script and B-roll capabilities: Creators can dramatically accelerate pre-production, production and post-production workflows using AI analysis of script to text to automatically create storyboards and previsualisations, as well as recommending b-roll clips for rough or final cuts.

–Creative assistants and co-pilots: With personalised generative AI-powered “how-tos,” users can master new skills and accelerate processes from initial vision to creation and editing.

–Starting later this year, Adobe begins introducing new generative AI features for video, audio, animation and motion graphics design.