Camera to cloud

“Ten years from now, cameras will not have media cards” – that’s the bold claim from Michael Cioni, Global SVP of Innovation at Frame.io, pioneers of cloud-based video review and collaboration. The driver behind this is Camera to Cloud (C2C) technology.

Camera to Cloud significantly speeds up the content creation process by reducing the time it takes to get from acquisition to postproduction. There’s no waiting for hard drives to be shipped or files to be copied from one device to another; proxy files are uploaded directly to the cloud from the camera, so that editors and remote stakeholders such as producers, directors and even customers, can start working on the material immediately.

Proxy files are lower quality copies of highresolution video, created to stand in for raw footage during the editing process. Because the file sizes are much smaller than the original, they will load faster, use less processing power and, most importantly, be much quicker to upload to the cloud using the public internet.

For many social media platforms, and indeed for breaking news on conventional broadcasting services, proxy video quality is usable. For higher production values, most popular editing applications can auto-conform. This means that an entire project can be edited, reviewed and approved using proxy media and then ‘picture locked’ for grading or audio sweetening simply by telling the editing application to switch to the high-resolution media. What is driving this at the acquisition side is the introduction of network-connected, in-the-field devices, such as ATOMOS’ CONNECT products, introduced at NAB earlier this year.

These new direct-to-cloud devices attach to any camera and simultaneously capture two versions of the footage: a high-quality DNxHR/ DNxHD/ProRes/ProRes RAW variant and a lightweight 1080p H.264/H.265 proxy file that gets instantly uploaded to Frame.io. The two versions share the same file name and timecode reference, thus enabling auto-conforming further down the line, as described above.

ATOMOS has developed a new progressive file transfer technology so that the upload of the proxy file starts as soon as the camera starts recording, and the only requirement is an internet connection. These transfers can be achieved over common 4G LTE, 5G, or Wi-fi networks.

Remarkable though this is, internet access speed is now the only bottleneck and the reason that proxy files are still required. The COVID pandemic had the knock-on effect of increasing average internet speeds by over 40% in a little over a year.

With advancements in network technology rapidly leading to a world where every corner of the planet will have internet access, in the not-so-far-off future C2C will be available to anyone, anywhere, supporting high quality files and Michael Cioni’s claim could well prove to be a reality.