NAB Perspectives: Aframe’s Mark Overington Talks Cloud, Growing U.S. Sports Market

Aframe celebrates its one-year anniversary in the U.S. this week at NAB 2013. The cloud-based production service, which already had an established client-base overseas, entered the U.S. market last year in Vegas, and much has changed in the 12 months since.

“Our data centers in New York and L.A. are very much up and running,” says Mark Overington, president of Aframe’s North America operations. “In the States now, we have 55 accounts of varying sizes. We want to focus more on sports and are seeing some traction there. There is a lot of opportunity in sports, and we’re going after that.”

The Aframe platform is already being used by Clean Cut Media and the ATP World Tour to share video content remotely. In addition, an unnamed major sports network is using it to share content over the cloud between remote productions and the broadcast center. Finally, BAMMA (British Association of Mixed Martial Arts) used the system to share live content with journalists around the world at a recent event in London.

Aframe essentially allows users to upload raw video from any location to Aframe’s private cloud, securely store it there, and share it with anyone.

The big news at NAB 2013 is the debut of Aframe 2.0, which features Edit Flow, allowing users to export their metadata out of Aframe and directly into the three major NLE platforms: Avid Media Composer, Apple Final Cut Pro, and Adobe Premiere. With Version 2.0, the timecode-specific metadata that Aframe users generate when commenting, logging, sub-clipping, and collecting clips in Aframe can be transferred directly from the cloud into an NLE platform. Once there, the metadata relinks with the original media — retaining all user changes automatically.

Other features in Aframe 2.0 include Panasonic’s AVC codec, a newly designed user interface, and an API Library.