One thing I see a lot in my line of work is a lot of talented, creative, and passionate people being forced to do really menial tasks in order to start the edit or start the production. Right? A lot of MAM companies will promise you the world when it comes to automating away these menial tasks, but usually there’s a pretty hefty price tag and a lengthy professional services process to get through. One of EditShare’s most exciting products actually remedies that.
Let me show you three things you can automate today using FLOW Automation.
QC Quarantine Automation
This first one I like to call the QC quarantine. This automation allows you to set up a watch folder for an ingest path. Anything that hits that watch folder immediately gets sent over to a QC server, something like Baton or QScan.
If it passes, we copy it into the proper media folder, and then we set the metadata to show that it passed at a certain date and time. If it fails, we move it into a quarantine media space that’s only accessible by one user, in this case, patient zero.
We send a notification email to patient zero saying there are clips waiting for you in the quarantine folder. Patient zero can now manually look over these clips that failed QC and determine what to do next.
This cuts down significantly on the per asset QC time because rather than you having to manually upload them or upload them to the QC server, they already live on the EditShare and proxies are being generated in the background during this QC process. Plus, there’s no way for editors to accidentally use assets that failed the QC check.
Mezzanine Automation
The next automation is a mezzanine automation. Oftentimes, you’re gonna be working with footage from multiple different cameras as well as graphics packages. All of these are gonna be different codecs at varying bit rates, and it’s gonna make it really difficult for you as an admin or a media manager to predict how the system is going to handle X number of editors on the system. This works by immediately taking any assets that are dropped into the ingest folder and transcoding them into a house mezzanine codec.
This is usually a codec that is in line with your absolute highest res spec for output. Once that transcode is done, it takes the original footage and moves it up to a cloud archive so that you always have access to it. And it also preserves the original file path in case you’re using something like a Sony camera with a really important file path structure. The new transcoded footage goes to the media folder that the editors will access for their actual projects.
And if this transcode fails because of some exotic codec, it actually sends an email to IT or the admin of the EditShare server to take a look at it and see what went wrong.
Metadata Trigger Automation
This last one is great if you need to organize a package of assets to send off to a remote contractor somewhere to download and edit. It starts with a metadata trigger, so we can take all of the assets we wanna send and say push to MediaSilo. Once that’s triggered, it transcodes to an .mp4 that’s a little lighter weight and easier to transfer. Then it runs a metadata check to see if that asset is confidential or not.
If it is confidential, then it sends a notification email to your security team saying that someone tried to upload confidential assets. It also notifies the original uploader, although this is optional. If it’s a green light and there are no confidential assets, we push it up to MediaSilo, and then we update the metadata on the clip in FLOW to say this was uploaded to MediaSilo on this date and time.
As you can see, these three automations alone could save dozens of working hours on your team every week, and you can make and adjust these at your leisure rather than having to call someone like me.
