International: Prime Focus Technologies (PFT), the technology arm of Prime Focus, today announced new functionalities and enhancements in its flagship CLEAR™ Media ERP Suite.
“We’re always working to make CLEAR better for our customers with additional functionalities whilst enabling ease of use. This time around we have some power-packed features across the product line focused on making micro-tasks in the content supply chain, faster and easier for the users,” said Vimalesh Melwani, Senior Vice President, Product Engineering, Prime Focus Technologies. “CLEAR is known for its interoperability, and we’ve further expanded our product integration portfolio to support 11 more partner products in this release.” he added.
The latest enhancements to CLEAR span across:
Production
- Apple TV App Enhancements: Now supports Android-based login in addition to the existing iOS-based login. Users can now browse the library assets or review incoming assets on the Apple TV app
- Faster Downloads: Direct download of assets from Azure BLOB using both Aspera and HTTPS for a faster download experience
Acquisition
- Enhanced Package Ingest: Now includes additional essence like metadata XMLs, package structure manifests, and audio/subtitle in the content package and ingest through ad-hoc or task-driven acquisition mechanisms. Addition for AWS SNS notification-based ingest in addition to an existing folder or standard UI-based acquisition
- LIVE Events Support: CLEAR now supports ‘schedule-driven’ acquisition for live content. Support extended to:
- Work-order-driven scheduled acquisitions
- DRM encrypted live proxies through integrations with Wowza & BuyDRM
Asset Management Operations
- Asset Preview: Obsoleted the Flash player. CLEAR is now integrated with PDFTron to support previewing of documents and images
- DR Enablement: CLEAR is now DR enabled for both its SaaS Cloud offering and Edge location. It activates a new site within hours, such that the users can continue their operations across the content value chain from where the disruption occurred
- System Integration Support: CLEAR API is now enhanced to support additional requests from external systems including Work Order APIs to manage the process and task execution; Asset management APIs to manage Asset lifecycle and Azure Service Bus integration to post real-time process and task execution status
- Partner/Vendor Onboarding: Introducing a simple 3-step process for on-boarding new partners/vendors – 1) define content package structure and associate with partners; 2) associate partners with particular titles; 3) set the transfer method (watch folder or UI based)
- BI Reports: CLEAR’s integration with Microsoft Power BI allows users to create reports leveraging the Data structures available for deriving business insights across multiple facets of the content lifecycle. The reporting engine provides rich feature sets for creating trend, aggregate and data visualization reports
Localization & Mastering Operations
- Multi-format Export: CLEAR Subtitling tool’s recent integration with EZConvert, enhances the export feature allowing users to generate subtitles as per the delivery specifications across different Linear TV and OTT destinations such as EBUTT, STL, Netflix TT, PAC and many more
- Script Import: CLEAR Subtitling tool adds a feature to import scripts or non-timecoded Subtitle files, for faster subtitling operations
- Enhanced Compliance Review: CLEAR Compliance Review tool now captures details like different boards, warnings, re-compliance information, etc. and allows easy export of compliance data as Excel, EDL and FCP XML for further editing and approval
Distribution
- Download-driven Distribution: Users can now invite recipients to download the package directly from CLEAR. Integration with Aspera makes the download fast, hassle-free and secure
- BOTS: CLEAR’s integration with Unified-Streaming gives clients the flexibility to choose a packaging standard (HLS, DASH, Smooth Streaming, Marlin) and DRM that suits their needs for delivering to OTT platforms. We’ve also enabled support for more delivery platforms including Sky Go, Sky On Demand and Virgin UK
- Subtitle Processing for Distribution: Subtitles can now be easily processed on CLEAR for multiple distribution requirements like clipping and re-timing of subtitle; format conversion; adding subtitles as DVB Teletext
