Coffee Status = Yellow
2lbs in office – 10lbs next week. Please brew responsibly.

• Green = Surplus
• Yellow = Limited Coffee Grounds
• Orange = Last Pot
• Red = No coffee

And thanks, Dave, for this graph illustrating Amount of Coffee in Office and its relationship to Office Panic Level.

Amount of Coffee in Office and its relationship to Office Panic Level

We’ve got a real treat for you today folks. Thanks to the tireless work of our expert trackers, we’ve managed to photograph the elusive North American Server Room Gator (Alligator Servus). We’re not the first to find her though as she’s been tagged for tracking purposes.

Alligator Servus spotted in the wild. Note the detailed labeling.

At 1’1″, she’s a healthy beauty. Apparently she’s pregnant since it looks like she’s nesting on her traditional nursery, the autoloader. Be careful though, they tend to be rather vicious when with young. Hopefully she’ll be able to hunt down enough snack food remnants to raise a healthy brood.

As someone who has been supporting Adobe apps for over ten years, I’ve watched Photoshop and Illustrator grow into the giant, powerful apps that they are today. Some would argue that all the new features have created bloated, behemoths of applications. But could this bloat have been avoided without compromising all the amazing features and capabilities that were added along the way? I’m not a software developer, so I have no idea on that one. But the promise of a world where I could design, illustrate, and retouch, using a .adobe file format — and open those files in a single Adobe application — is exciting. It would certainly ease our software deployment process as well…

Nack walks through the hypothetical pros and cons surrounding this computing model. Definitely worth a read.

First, a quick discussion of semantics:

When you ingest a media file into Final Cut Server, it creates an asset. This asset is actually a collection of files, including the original media file, or primary representation. If the file being uploaded is a graphics or video file, Final Cut Server creates additional representations: a poster frame and a thumbnail. These are used to represent the asset’s media within Final Cut Server. If the file being uploaded is a video asset, a clip proxy representation is also generated, used for viewing the file within Final Cut Server.  This representation is created by transcoding the primary representation file to a lower-resolution codec.

Asset Representations in Final Cut Server

So a video asset is actually a container that’s made up of a bunch of files. This is pretty cool, and it’s mostly transparent to the end-user in Final Cut Server. However, while these representations are customizable (codecs, quality, etc), they all generated on ingest. Final Cut Server doesn’t currently support a way to create a new representation of an asset on-the-fly and have that representation become part of the asset container.

I’m struggling with this limitation as I explore Final Cut Server/Episode Engine integration. It would be ideal if I could setup Episode integration via a Final Cut Server copy response to an Episode watch folder, and have the resulting transcoded file copied back into Final Cut Server and made a representation of the original asset. Right now there’s no way to do this, so instead we are only able to re-ingest the new transcoded file as a new asset. And there is no relationship between this new asset and the original asset from which it was created.

Frustrating, but we’re thinking about ways around this. More to come as our tests and thinking solidifies. More info on Episode Engine/Final Cut Server integration in this pdf from Telestream’s website.

Final Cut Server client

Apple markets Final Cut Server as a tool primarily for Final Cut Pro users. Apple’s focus is on enabling users to manage their FCP projects and related files, providing them with automations to save time, and giving production teams a centralized system for collaboration. Beyond Apple’s sales pitch, we think Final Cut Server has real potential to play a central role in a production and distribution platform made up of a framework of connected systems.

Here’s an example of a typical broadcast infrastructure:

• Storage area network (SAN) for storage
• Media asset management system (MAM) for organizing and versioning
• Editor/artist workstations
• Producer workstations
• A transcode system for delivery

Now here’s an example of how those pieces might fit together in a broadcast workflow:

1. Content from tape or tapeless media is ingested through the MAM. Metadata is added at ingest – both technical metadata (shot, tape, take, etc) and possibly contextual metadata (actor, object brands, locations).
2. Data is saved to the SAN, where it is cut and crafted by editors and artists. As the content comes together, project files and new assets are saved to the SAN by editors and artists, and reviewed by producers.
3. As content is completed, it is transcoded for delivery to television, tape, and the web. Web distribution might include delivery in a custom player, and/or Hulu, YouTube, Vimeo.
4. Once content is in the wild, content owners need analytics tools to understand who is watching what and where.

Beyond its out-of-the box capabilities, Final Cut Server can be customized to play a key role in workflows like these. While it doesn’t include an API, developers can leverage custom responses in Final Cut Server to read and write XML and run external scripts. On its developer website, Apple provides an example of Final Cut Server integration with an external Rails application that enables the viewing and commenting of movie clips in a web browser. An example like this serves as a useful starting place when exploring building the middleware to connect Final Cut Server to other applications or platforms in a workflow.

Episode Engine Admin

For example, Final Cut Server leverages Compressor for all of its out-of-the-box transcoding. However many existing infrastructures exist using established transcoding systems, such as Telestream’s Episode Engine. By combining metadata subscriptions and watch folders in Final Cut Server with custom responses that leverage external scripts, Episode can easily be integrated as the transcode delivery component for a Final Cut Server workflow. Similarly, the ability to read and write XML to assets in Final Cut Server makes possible the development of web applications that interact with assets, and can even store information in their own disparate databases, populating Final Cut Server when appropriate.

What excites us about this are the many Final Cut Server integration possibilities that are not currently being talked about. And since Control Group marries Apple video integration expertise with a team of developers under the same roof, we’re excited to continue to innovate in this area. Give us a shout if you’d like to open up a dialog on how Final Cut Server might fit into your broadcast or production workflow.