Last year, we announced our Camera to Cloud effort with launch partner Teradek. The CUBE 655 played a pivotal part in the workflow, as it receives an SDI signal and automatically transcodes it to H.264 proxies that go directly to Frame.io for immediate viewing or editing through our NLE integrations. In fact, in just a little over a year’s time, more than a quarter of a million takes have been uploaded from all sorts of productions through the CUBE!
Today, the Camera to Cloud workflow takes a major leap forward in image quality with the new Teradek Serv 4K. With the ability to capture in 10-bit 4K at up to 85Mbps, it encodes BT2084/PQ files and uploads them to Frame.io in the background for instant HDR review (or for SDR review with H.264 and higher proxies, as the CUBE 655 already does).
There’s also an additional loop-through SDI port, so you’re no longer constrained to keeping the CUBE at the end of an SDI chain. With the new integrated dual V-mount or Anton Bauer gold mount battery plates, you can mount Serv 4K directly onto the camera, where it sits in-line with the camera and battery in a more convenient ergonomic location that requires less cabling to power.
New hardware, new workflows
The Camera to Cloud workflow revolutionized production by connecting the set to creatives or stakeholders anywhere in the world, eliminating the barriers of time and distance.
What this new product integration does is to take what was, only a short time ago, restricted to generating “only” H.264 proxies encoding at 15Mbps and gives you the ability to now share and access vastly higher-quality proxies—4K 10-bit 4:2:0/4:2:2 files encoding at 85Mbps—that can be edited immediately at a quality that’s (in some use cases) broadcast quality.
With the new Teradek Serv 4K you can shoot anywhere in the world and have a cut back from your editor before you pack up for the day.
With our partnerships with Colorfront, Pomfort, and DaVinci Resolve, you can send 4K files to create color-corrected dailies immediately—there’s no longer a need to wait for hero dailies and swap them for proxies. And there’s potentially no need to relink back to original camera files if 10-bit in 4K meets your exhibition-quality standards.
Think about the possibilities: you’re shooting a film and you want your colorist to send you colored stills as soon as you cut your camera. Or you no longer want to have to wait to download to hard drives—instead, you can take advantage of the full 85Mbps 4K encoding by uploading straight to Frame.io. With the new Teradek Serv 4K you can shoot anywhere in the world and have a cut back from your editor before you pack up for the day.
The cost of Serv 4K is $2790, which also means that the cost of the CUBE 655 has decreased to $1900. So if the H.264 proxy workflow works for you, it’s now even more affordable!
Cloud-enabling technology continues to develop at an accelerated pace, and with this latest partnership Frame.io remains at the forefront of centralized, cloud-based video collaboration solutions.
We hope you’ll let us know what kinds of new workflows and use cases you’re creating. There’s nothing more exciting for us than to have our customers think of ways to use Frame.io that even we haven’t thought of.
