PARIS and BOSTON, MA. April 13th, 2017 – Firefly Cinema, an innovative developer of on-set dailies and color grading software, today announced that it is providing direct integration with axle Gear from axle Video, the leader in affordable media management. Demonstrated for the first time on axle’s NAB booth SL13609, the integration enables on-set color graded images and metadata from FireFly Cinema’s FireDay dailies management tool to flow seamlessly into the axle media management system.
The workflow implemented by the two companies allows high-quality dailies to be processed, tagged and color graded on FireDay’s system on set, then brought back to the postproduction site where it can be managed and further tagged in axle’s Gear solution. In addition to color information, all on-set metadata from FireDay, such as circled takes, are instantly searchable in axle, enabling editing teams to start working faster.
As HDR and UHD workflows continue to grow, having an affordable and simple on-set-to-finish color-centered workflow saves productions from extra copy steps and rendering processes. “FireFly Cinema is honored to be working with axle to enable on-set dailies flow into postproduction with the look that the director of photography intended,” said Philippe Reinaudo, CEO of FireFly Cinema. “As budgets and schedules continue to shrink, it’s never been more important for production and postproduction to have the most efficient, bulletproof workflow possible.”
Firefly’s FireDay software can output XML in an axle Gear-compatible format, as well as the concurrent generation of color-graded H.264 proxy media that can be used directly by axle. When media is copied to a shared storage system cataloged by axle Gear, a seamless workflow is created in which one or more channels of ingest can be fed directly into an axle Gear system, allowing immediate editing and further processing at the postproduction facility.
"We’re thrilled to offer this type of integrated capture solution as part of our radically simple media management system," said Sam Bogoch, axle CEO. “Firefly’s powerful yet affordable dailies and color grading capabilities raise both production quality and speed for an industry focused more than ever on agile field capture for television, cinematic and web release.”
Both FireDay and axle Gear can be run on Mac Pros, making this end to end system a powerful resource for video capture, sharing and management. Alternatively, for larger configurations the system can be spread across multiple Mac Pros, with FireDay including options for clustered transcoding and color grading of 4K+ RAW media from RED, ARRI and other cinema cameras.
A combined software solution can be implemented for well under $10,000, with annual maintenance, support and subscription costs of about $3,000 per year after the first year.
