Features

How to save 30% of your edit budget?

Maarten Verwaest
September 5, 2016

Limecraft Edge is the ingest solution of choice for many reporters, camera assistants and data handlers to manage their ingest workflow, i.e. executing the secure backup, creating dailies and transferring the rushes or semi-finished cuts.

Limecraft Edge is a tool for data handlers to back up your media

 

They prefer Limecraft Edge because material is available for review, editing or publishing much faster compared with other tools. In its latest release, we added a number of valuable steps, specifically targeting television series. Using automated audio synchronisation, colour correction and pre-cut (‘auto-assembly’), producers report to save 30% or more on their budget allotted to offline edit. In this blog post, we explain how you can get the most out of your ingest process by using Limecraft Edge.

💡 More about configuring Limecraft Edge on the knowledge base.

Why do you need software in the first place?

Some of the largest and well known producers prefer Limecraft for managing their production assets and workflows because of its flexibility and scalability. Nevertheless, due to the limited bandwidth of your internet connection, you may find it cumbersome to upload video files to the cloud. So you find yourself often dispatching hard drives or memory sticks.

Limecraft allows you to drive a hybrid storage model, which is a solution to structurally cope with the connectivity limitations of commercial network connections. By using Limecraft Edge to prepare and upload video files, you can start reviewing or cutting in minutes, even when using a mobile connection. Therefore Limecraft uses high-quality proxies. While some producers use this proxy for the final edit, most of our customers prefer using the original footage for the final cut. Therefore we make sure the proxy remains linked with the copies of original footage on near-line or cold storage. Proxies offer you the convenience of online collaboration, while you can still finish in the highest possible quality. No more hard discs, no more couriers to send these around overnight, and no more expensive file transfer solutions!

Why you need Backup and Checksum Verification

Secure ingest workflows always start with a backup prior to any further processing or transfer. Because you are probably dealing with very large files, you are aware that quite a lot can go wrong between the initial backup and the final ingest. That’s exactly why Limecraft Edge calculates a “checksum” during the backup. If, at any point later in time, the backup or another copy of the material is modified, on purpose or by accident, we will warn you.

Many people use a straight copy from disc to disc, and believe the copies are identical if the total file sizes and the number of files match. The truth is, however, that Windows explorer or Apple Finder report the allotted space for the copy (and not the actual size of the files). Also, if you’re comparing contents of a folder or mounted volume, the file count and used space may be different due to hidden files. In summary, copying with just ‘Drag & Drop’ rarely gives any indication of copy failures. Nor it gives you the assurance of identical binary sequences within the files. You can only ensure the similarity by calculating and comparing the checksum values of the source and the copied files.

Limecraft Edge takes care of that burden all along the line. It compares between original and backed up versions, and farther down the process it double checks the similarity between the backed up and the effectively ingested files. As a producer, by using Limecraft Edge, you get the best possible insurance for safe material handling.

What’s new

But now there is more. In its latest release we added a number of valuable features to reduce the offline edit budget. To achieve this, you can now instruct Edge to automatically execute a number of steps that would otherwise be done manually in the edit suite, thereby significantly offloading edit suite capacity.

To make sure your dailies look as good as possible, Limecraft Edge now takes care as well of audio synchronisation and colour correction. It manipulates colour by reversible LUT processing, meaning that Edge doesn’t modify the original footage nor the edit proxies. Edge hands over the original non graded material or the non graded edit proxies together with the used LUT’s. By doing so, the online editors retain maximum flexibility.

More importantly, we cracked the challenge of automatically cutting shots into scenes. This means that after Edge ingested the material, as a producer you can use a view whereby shots and takes are correctly sorted per scene. You literally have your production in your hands, on the day of the shoot, without any manual intervention in an edit suite.

Producers that applied these improvements in their Television Series production report to cut 30% or more of their budget for offline editing. As a side effect, due to the improved visibility, directors and editors may diagnose technical or editorial issues much faster. This makes it much easier to remedy the problem and improves the quality of the end result.