ATP World Tour Uncovered: Clean Cut Media delivers tennis content Without Limits
Clean Cut Media is an independent television and media production company based in London. The ATP World Tour commissions Clean Cut to produce the 47 episode-per-year show ‘ATP World Tour Uncovered’, in conjunction with LA-based Without Limits Productions. The finished show is then distributed to broadcasters around the world, airing in over 150 countries.
Sending broadcast quality media between multiple destinations involves managing the transfer of very large amounts of complicated video data. In many cases this involves couriering drives or struggling with FTP transfers.
In addition to replacing the traditional time and cost-intensive process of distributing tapes and hard drives, a solution was required that could support the ingest of footage securely from 61 ATP tournaments in 31 countries. Due to the weekly programme schedule, a vendor that could accelerate review and approval of highlights and promo packages was sought.
Aframe’s ingest solution overcomes the traditional problems of uploading large video files from disparate locations – minus frustrating restarts or broken files as happens with other file transfer solutions. The high-res media is ingested directly from the camera in its native format into Aframe’s secure cloud storage facility through the latest UDP file transfer technology – often at 15x faster than FTP.
Once automatically transcoded into a common codec, production teams in Los Angeles and London immediately access and organise footage over a simple web-based interface – saving time and capital in courier charges. This accessibility allows Clean Cut Media to deal with each broadcaster’s unique workflow, broadcast standards and requirements, with always-accessible content stored securely in the cloud.
“This secure private cloud network is a smarter way for us to upload large files and manage our online archive easily,” said January Lo, production manager at Clean Cut Media.
To further accelerate review and approval of the highlights, feedback on the footage can be gathered in timecode specific comments to give the editor as much information as possible and this is all frame-accurately annotated for accuracy. “We were looking for a time-efficient and cost-saving tapeless workflow. The great thing about Aframe is that it creates proxies from hi-res files for clients to view our work immediately before we send out the final version for broadcasters to download the full original format,” said Lo.