User:Stu20001/sandbox

Aframe Media Services Limited is a London-based software-as-a-service company that provides cloud video production storage and workflow tools. The company also has offices in Boston, Massachusetts, USA and Durham, United Kingdom.

Its namesake product is called Aframe. Aframe is a cloud video production and asset management system with capabilities in collaboration, review and approval, archive and tagging.

History
Aframe Ltd was founded in 2009 by David Peto and Stef Lewandowski.

After training as an actor, Peto became a producer involved in making TV ads and brand films. In 2005 Peto, along with co-founders Tom Bridges and Roland Woolner, established a post production facility called Unit Post Production - www.unit.tv – the first entirely tapeless finishing facility, based on Apple Final Cut Pro editing software. Peto sold his share in Unit in 2009. By this time the business had 50 staff and a turnover of £3 million.

He set up Aframe after seeing the issues tapeless production was causing for film and TV producers who needed to manage, archive and transfer vast amounts of data. Lewandowski joined as Chief Innovation Officer and the company raised £2.5m in start-up funding from a consortium of investors.

The company was named in the 2011 Smarta100 awards In 2012, Aframe raised a $7 million (£4.5 million) Series A round of funding led by Octopus Investments and Eden Ventures, with participation by existing investor, Northstar Ventures,.

The investment allowed Aframe to launch into North America and establish operations in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles. Mark Ovington, one of the founding team at Avid Technology and its former head of marketing, was appointed as president of Aframe North America.

Lewandowski left the company in April 2012 and, after working on several projects, founded Makeshift in January 2013.

In January 2013, the company announced a partnership with Panasonic with Panasonic selling Aframe licenses in the United States and Europe through its network of Panasonic pro video resellers. The partnership also enabled the creation of workflows for users of Panasonic’s AVC codecs for P2: AVC-LongG and AVC-Proxy to use Aframe.

The Aframe platform
The Aframe platform is a cloud-based software as a service video production and asset management system. Users of the service can upload video assets to a cloud storage system then use a browser based interface to manage, share and work with the assets.

Aframe’s technical performance is based around a four stage workflow. The product is modular allowing users to use elements as required for their project.

1) “Video In” - Centralized Repository
Aframe provides a secure centralised repository for their video content. Users use UDP accelerated transfer technology to deliver files to one of the company’s four storage nodes in Los Angeles, New York and London. Servers are owned and maintained by Aframe, stored in data centres linked by dedicated fibre connections. As files are received, data (including any folder structures and associated files) is stored locally on spinning disks. A back-up copy is also sent to a twin location in case of disaster recovery . Aframe transcodes all incoming assets to a standard web proxy for playback in the browser via the Aframe UI. The system can transcode most professional video formats

2) “Work”
Through the web-based front-end, users can carry out tasks with their video library, within a non-destructive space that preserves source content in the form in which it was originally presented.

Users can 'bucketise' content by adding selected clips to 'Collections' defined by editorial strands or search terms. They can also attach timecode-based markers, as well as giving clips edited titles and rich text summaries.

3) “Video Out”
Clips stored in Aframe can be shared with external collaborators via a streaming web link, with the option to include download access to either the original media or H.264 web proxy. At any time, project team members can pull down camera card rushes in their native folder structure to a local workspace via UDP accelerated transfer technology. Clip metadata is also exportable as a sidecar file.

The Edit Flow feature allows the timecode-specific metadata that Aframe users generate to be transferred directly from the cloud into any of the top three NLE platforms. Once there, the metadata re-links with the original media, retaining all user changes automatically.

A RESTful API enables businesses to access the underlying Aframe technology accessing the Aframe player to stream video on a website or unify disparate video systems multi-platform/multi-location environment.

4) Archive
After a project has been completed, Aframe can be used for archiving the associated rushes and finished edits.

Services
Aframe also offers video tagging, logging and transcription services for companies that wish to outsource this work. This service is based in their Durham centre.