Prime Focus Technologies Aims To Make a CLEAR Difference

Prime Focus Technologies (PFT), the technology arm of Prime Focus, today announced new features and advanced security enhancements of its enterprise resource planning software CLEAR to help customers embrace the virtual work environment during the current global COVID-19 lockdown.

“Empowering our customers to work from home, we have bolstered CLEAR with powerful security & ease-of-use features conducive to a remote, work from home environment,” said Ramki Sankaranarayanan, PFT founder and global CEO. “As we battle COVID-19, we understand the concerns around business continuity. While this is an unprecedented challenge on all fronts, as your technology partner, our entire software team is working from home and continuing to support the usage of the CLEAR platform, globally.”

The new features and functionalities include:

Enhanced Security

• New-generation HTML 5 player enabled with Hollywood-grade DRM encryption.
• Support for Just-In-Time (JIT) visual watermarking embedded within the stream for streaming through CLEAR as a secure alternative to generating watermarking on the client side.

Ease-of-Use

• New Apple TV app custom-built for viewing content on TVs in a simple interface is designed for instant and secure access. Additionally, there’s now Screener support to PFT’s Apple TV app to offer a seamless viewing experience to executive producers, film critics, etc., in any remote location to make it easy during the COVID-19 times.
• New Folder admin — Extended folder administration to allow users to organize and manage their projects, eliminating any delays due to prior admin-driven process.
• Faster Download – Direct & faster download from S3 and Azure storage enabled, so vendors can quickly download files and perform assigned tasks
• New UI experience – Launched a new light themed UI giving you an option to customize your UI experience and make work from home fun!  
• On-boarding partners – Clients can manage the Production Houses and Studios who provide content with ease now. They can now define the package structure, associate Shows and associate Users, with expiry dates, all from one UI
• Powerful Admin Module enhancement with condensed permissions to easily handle custom user roles

Content Acquisition

New functionalities to simplify content acquisition processes and reduce dependencies as much as possible:

• Enhanced support for acquisition of content packages instead of individual files.
• Support extended to DPP-standardized content.
• Bulk QC — Review single asset and correct multiple copies, eliminating repetition.
• Vidchecker support for auto QC — Introducing a more robust acquisition process with new layers of checks including antivirus checks and auto-QC through Vidchecker.

Content Servicing

Introduced automation in content localization, to make it easier to perform and review tasks on CLEAR:

• Subtitle tool inside CLEAR with the ability to create and review streaming-proxy-based subtitles to support work from home and freelance operations all around the world without having to download.
• CLEAR provides users with subtitle import capabilities to perform QC of vendor deliverables along with subtitle re time-coding, which allows customers to import transcript file and time-code quickly.

Content Distribution

PFT has quickly enabled on-demand cloud distribution on CLEAR leveraging the most commonly used cloud technologies:

• Cloud transcode technologies support — Support for AWS Media Convert and Vantage.
• Standardised S3 delivery — Extended deliveries to S3, apart from Aspera, FTP/SFTP and Signiant.
• Extended flexibility in distribution, by allowing users to quickly generate new distribution profiles from an existing profile just by overriding certain profile attributes.