Prime Focus Technologies has returned to IBC and, according to Ramki Sankaranarayanan, Founder and Global CEO, it has major announcements to share around its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software Clear.

“Clear is one of the strongest content supply chain automation platforms out there and it’s just become significantly better for two reasons,” he said. “One, there is new advanced scheduling functionality within the supply chain platform that’s able to communicate with the higher-level business systems of our customers and be able to dynamically cascade the business priority down the supply chain.”

D4 Prime Focus Technology. Ramki Sankaranarayanan. SR. MB

Sankaranarayanan: ’A key feature is converting a business priority to a supply chain priority and doing it dynamically’

This means that if you need to change the scheduling date for a certain programme or film, whatever supply chain activities are associated with all the assets across the media company and third-party suppliers will all get reprioritised automatically.

“That’s a unique ability,” said Sankaranarayanan. “Converting a business priority to a supply chain priority and doing it dynamically is a key new feature.”

The second new feature brings greater collaboration for postproduction. “Obviously, with the pandemic remote postproduction has gone remote. The problem is collaboration in post is not fully supportive of such constructs. It’s very manual. It’s outside the system.”

Sankaranarayanan gives an example of a remote editor working in Premiere Pro who needs to render out a file and upload it to Dropbox or a private YouTube or Vimeo channel for client review and approval.

“The client is no longer sitting next to you at your edit station,” he adds. “Imagine having to do that for three or four versions for everything that you do. So our big announcement for IBC is collaboration in and around remote postproduction sessions. We have launched a Collaboration Hub, so editors working in Clear will be able to dynamically collaborate from an edit perspective at multiple levels.”

Security has been addressed by natively integrated Zoom. “So only if you are an authenticated user inside Clear can you and I share a zoom session within Collaboration Hub,” explained Sankaranarayanan. “There’s also the ability to visually annotate chat dynamically, as well as asset sharing from within the Collaboration Hub.”

This sharing feature is seamlessly integrated into Premiere Pro via the Clear Panel.

“So if I’m using editing in Premiere Pro, and I’m rendering a cut, I can click Share and [clients for] review and approval automatically get notified. I no longer need to pull the file out of the system out and upload it to something external,” he added.

There are also announcements around Vision Cloud. “We are launching the most comprehensive set of foreign language mastering technology, using AI to accelerate the [process] for faster monetisation,” said Sankaranarayanan. “We’re also introducing probably the best deep metadata engine in Vision Cloud.”

Stand Number: MS20 and MS21

Company: Prime Focus Technologies