Colorfront is majoring on streaming software which live-streams secure, reference-quality pictures and audio with sub-second latency for remote collaborative review.
With distributed workflows now fairly much the norm throughout the industry, vendors are urgently making the tools to help recognise the new reality. A feature is now almost as likely to be edited or graded at someone’s home for a good deal of the post process than it is in a facility.
It’s the sort of environment that is seeing products such as the Colorfront Streaming Server Mini. First previewed at HPA 2022 and now part of the frame.io camera to cloud workflow display on the NAB show floor, despite its name Streaming Server Mini is a new, software-only product for Mac/PC workstations. Essentially it enables artists to encode and live-stream, frame and color-accurate, reference-quality, work-in-progress over the public internet to multiple production stakeholders, wherever they are around the world. This can be done directly from their NLE, compositing or grading systems, with the likes of Adobe Premiere, Final Cut, Blackmagic Resolve, Autodesk Flame, and Foundry Nuke all being supported.
It works with AJA or Blackmagic video I/O, and in real-time with HD/2K content in both SDR and HDR, supporting Dolby Vision and multi-channel audio. Crucially, it also supports SRT (Secure Reliable Transport Protocol) and 256-bit AES encryption to ensure content remains protected.
Colorfront Streaming Server Mini joins a decent line up of similar tools that includes the original Colorfront Streaming Server, a graduate of HPA 2021 that does a similar job but in a 1RU chassis and can cope with up to four channels of 4K 4:4:4 or 4:2:0, 256-bit AES-encrypted video. And for those moving away from on-prem hardware, the Advanced Streaming Gateway; a private, user-owned/operated, high-performance SRT streaming gateway, available on AWS cloud or the data center of your choice.