axle ai is announcing immediate availability of its Remote Leap bundle, a complete solution for remote media access priced at $295/month on a 4-year lease (or $11,995 for purchase). As its name implies,the bundle lets media teams make the leap to remote workflows from traditional “sneakernet” solutions where hard drives are passed around in person between team members. The solution, comprised of axle ai’s industry-leading video search software and state-of-the art Apple computing hardware that acts as a server, represents a value breakthrough while integrated solutions with media management software typically cost over $50,000. Remote access and search are increasingly needed today as COVID-19 restrictions require work from home and make travel and in-person collaboration difficult. Media teams and postproduction facilities can hook up this complete solution to their network and cloud storage, and be up and running with full remote access in a matter of hours. Unlike cloud-only service providers whose costs rise dramatically as more media are stored, axle ai’s Remote Leap pricing is the same regardless of whether the site manages tens or hundreds of terabytes of media files.
The Remote Leap solution includes a 5-user version of axle ai 2020, the company’s ‘radically simple’ remote access and search software. axle ai 2020 features a browser front end that lets users remotely access and tag, catalog and search their media files, and the bundle adds 500 hours per year of integrated AI-driven transcription, for a total of 2,000 hours over the 4 year lease period, as well as axle’s Reverse Proxy remote access option for a secure way for media teams to work from home and on-set while accessing large amounts of shared media. Axle ai’s plug-in panels for the Adobe Creative Cloud suite – Premiere Pro CC, AfterEffects CC, Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC and InDesign CC – are included, as well as an export capability for Apple’s Final Cut Pro X software.
Given the large amounts of video, often several terabytes, that can be accumulated by a video team in a single shoot, axle ai Remote Leap saves enormous time and effort by enabling remote search, management and transcription of those media files. Finally, the software functionality is bundled with Apple’s newest iMac 27” 5k i9 hardware, a high-performance all-in-one desktop computer configured with 10 cores and 20 threads of Intel i9 processing capability, a Radeon 5000 series GPU, 16 Gigabytes of RAM, a 10 Gigabit network interface and 512GB of system SSD, as well as 8TB of external storage to house streaming H.264 proxy media.
The Remote Leap bundle can be connected to nearly any existing storage, whether on-premise (NAS or SAN), cloud based, or both. Modules are also available to integrate with most archival systems such as LTO tape libraries. Media teams and postproduction facilities can hook up this complete solution to their existing storage, and be up and running with full remote access workflows in a matter of hours.
One axle ai customer, Gerry Field of American Public Television, was able to convert his company’s demanding video workflows to remote access almost overnight using the software and integrated Apple hardware. “axle made it possible to get a system appropriately scaled for what we need, and for the resources that we have. The two equal parts are cost and complexity. There are a lot of asset management products in the market that, particularly for my needs, are tremendously overbuilt. We needed something that could be installed easily and give us access, quickly, to the content that we need to see. From there the biggest challenge was getting some of the people used to going to a screening room to screening in their browser, and building their confidence.”
The fact that axle is not technically demanding was very important: “APT has good talented and technically aware staff but we’re not the kind of company that has a deep engineering department, or a stable of editors” Gerry added. “I could possibly do deeper, more interesting things with a more expensive system, but my experience with things like that is they sound good, but wind up being a boat anchor.”
