GLOOKAST continues to lead and innovate with regard to solving the complex challenges of today’s broadcast and media production workflows. GLOOKAST products remove the complexity of ingesting, parking, retrieving, transforming and outgesting content through seamless integration across multiple platforms.
Founded in 2009, with headquarters in both Florida and Portugal, GLOOKAST’s core competency is the development of products to simplify and automate digital media workflows. Since no two workflows are the same, GLOOKAST has a product suite to address the full range of workflows: broadcast production, news production, post-production, field production, and content distribution. The company’s first product, Gloobox Capturer was specifically designed to meet the needs of broadcasters to capture baseband video, encode it as DVCPro and store as Avid OpAtom MXF media. The company remains on the cutting edge of new product technology and development and was the first company to offer a 4K ingest solution for Avid centric workflows.
As an Avid Alliance partner, GLOOKAST has maintained a strong, collaborative relationship with Avid for several years and throughout a series of large and complex projects in some of the world’s largest media organizations. GLOOKAST Membership to Avid’s Alliance Partner Program is by invitation only and requires a rigorous certification process. GLOOKAST
“In today’s highly-competitive media environment, media organizations business models are in constant flux and their media workflows need to be as dynamic, flexible, adaptable, simple, and reliable as consumer demand,” said Alan Hoff, Vice President, Market Solutions, Avid. “With GLOOKAST HD and 4K ingest solutions and open media services, our joint customers can seamlessly convert their current production facilities into fully integrated and collaborative, multi-res workflows”.
GLOOKAST continues to innovate and expand their product offerings and support, including Gloobox Ingester; a solution for file based workflows, allowing for the ingest automation and metadata editing of professional formats, including SONY, Panasonic, RED, ARRI and others. The company’s products also fully support prosumer formats like GoPro, Canon XF and mobile formats from Android, Apple and Blackberry.
The Glooport product family offers solutions for media parking, retrieval and movement between online and nearline systems, media transcoding within the same storage system or between systems, and file outgest for broadcast, distribution or archival. Everything is done through native integration into your editing environment, making the learning curve almost nonexistent.
GLOOKAST considers themselves the glue that holds broadcast together when they state that, “Where did our name come from? GLOOKAST = “Glue” for “Broadcast”. Our customers already had the tools to capture content (XDCAM HD, XDCAM EX, DVCPRO HD, AVC-I, uncompressed HD, HD/SD SDI, etc.) and they already had the storage for their media (local, SAN, NAS, Avid, etc.). What they needed was the “glue” to ingest their content in multiple, simultaneous resolutions and the ability to deliver the media and metadata to their current storage devices.”
It’s the way GLOOKAST products can work either standalone or in combination that “glues” each workflow together. Gloobox products are capable of capture or ingest to multiple formats and destinations in real-time. This functionality means that users can capture both high resolution and low resolution (proxy) media. Users can then store the hi-res content on low cost nearline storage and proxy media on their production storage. The system can just as easily store the high resolution content locally while the low resolution media can be sent to a remote location. Partial file retrieval can be done by adding Glooport media|retriever. A solution like this was deployed by TV Record to cover the Pan American Games in Toronto to automate offline to online production between facilities located in Toronto and São Paulo.
“Sports events of this magnitude generate massive amounts of files, which can add up to many times the number of hours of coverage. We needed to ensure that our ingest system would provide efficient encoding and trans-wrapping of a wide variety of formats to fulfill our coverage requirements at the games. Since our facilities, both in Toronto and in Sao Paulo, are based on Avid Media Central, a proven compatibility with Avid systems was a key factor in selecting GLOOKAST”, said Jose Marcelo Amaral, Director of Engineering and Operations for TV Record.
Using GLOOKAST Capturer and Ingester, along with Glooport media|retriever and media|transformer, Casablanca Studios has automated 4K baseband capture from 5 Studios and file ingest from SONY F55 cameras, parking 4K content on nearline storage, while creating multiple HD resolutions for editing using Interplay and Isis. Final edits are conformed to 4K using partial restore, up-rezing only the media used in the final edit. This allows for an episode to be finished both in HD and 4K.
To guarantee content protection and availability for distribution across multiple locations and different media platforms, finished episodes are safely stored back into MatrixStore, using Glooport media|parker. The solution at Casablanca Studios was architected, integrated and supported by Florida and Brazil based integrators, CIS Group
The GLOOKAST team has the ability, when needed, to call on the knowledge and resources of its sister company and workflow design & systems integration partner, CIS Group, a services provider and systems integrator with 30 years of experience in the broadcast and post-production industry. With two experienced teams, ready to serve clients throughout the world, this partnership ultimately helps customers optimize their workflows while saving money.
GLOOKAST, in conjunction with Object Matrix, has also worked with the largest production facility in South America where they have deployed Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity platforms to Globo at its Rio de Janeiro state-of-art production facility (Globo Studios).
TV Globo, one of world’s leading communications companies, implemented end-to-end disaster recovery workflows using proven and integrated solutions from GLOOKAST and Object Matrix. The unique solution enables automated, or on–demand archiving of content using Avid Interplay interface, making both full resolution and low resolution content available at both the main production center site and the disaster recovery location.
“Ensuring that work can continue at any of our production facilities is of paramount importance. We require not only seamless business continuity; but also, an automated workflow, capable of ensuring that each and every project change, asset movement, clip editing, or asset deletion, would be immediately and automatically reflected in our disaster recovery site. After much consideration, we determined that implementing a disaster recovery strategy using technology from GLOOKAST and Object Matrix, would bring technical, strategic, and commercial benefits to our company” stated Mauricio Felix, Project and Support Technology Director. “Combining the ability for our editors to continue working regardless of local outage with the capability of seamlessly bringing content back to the primary location is what impressed us most.”
GLOOKAST develops tools that solve the most challenging issues of today’s media production. They remove the complexity of ingesting, parking, retrieving, transforming and outgesting content through seamless integration across multiple platforms. GLOOKAST empowers their customers, like NBC, TV GLOBO, ITV, Televisa, SKY, Casablanca, Heat TV, TV Record. with the freedom to choose the tools they like from the vendors they prefer.
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