A Look at Ci from Sony Media Cloud Services

doddle by Jeremiah Hall

A little over a month ago, I got the opportunity to sit down and take a conference call with the people at Sony Media Cloud Services. They showed me their product, gave me a detailed demo of it, and spent the better part of an hour talking to me. I said I was going to take a month and play with it before I wrote anything.

Then the other day on a message board I found someone talking about it as a “Creative Cloud” killer. I started to reply, but thought better of it. I knew I had to stop playing with Ci (pronounced “See”), the name of the product, and start writing about it because there’s something you need to understand from the start: this is not a Creative Cloud killer. It’s a companion.
Ci is cloud computing with a dash of social media. Let’s take a look at a tool called Video Review. You can upload footage, and it can be viewed by those you invite to view it. Videographers from one end of the country to the other, or world, can put their footage up so producers in another part of the world can see it. And they can make notes, or make notes literally on an individual frame.

You can also draw circles and arrows on individual frames to make your point, point out a t-shirt that needs blurring, show what part of the frame to focus on, show an editor 600 miles away how you think that wipe-pattern should come in, let your effects guy know where the CGI building should be for this shot. Everyone involved can contribute, make suggestions, give notes, without having to sit through a long on-site meeting. Or a conference-call where half the participants can’t see the video, or the video lags so long no one is quite up-to-speed on what the other end of the phone is talking about. read more...