2005: The meteoric rise in the FBT share price continues

Keep it in your browsers

Gavin Aimes tests out Forbidden Technologies’ Forscene browser-based editing system, which requires no software or media storage – just an account and a browser.

publication: www.newsreel.tv Article first published: Autumn 2005

Forbidden Technologies has been developing video compression and web streaming products since it was founded in 1998. Its latest developments is Forscene, an internet browser-based logging, editing, web and mobile publishing tool. Unlike other non-linear edit systems, Forscene doesn’t require any software installation or media storage. All it requires is a PC or Mac with Java, 512Mb of RAM, a 3GHz processor and a 2Mb broadband connection (further releases should run on a 512K connection).

Instead of digitizing material onto hard drives in your edit suite, you upload DV content directly into your Forscene account via a firewire cable. This material is then compressed and uploaded onto a remote server. Once your material is uploaded you can edit and browse content from any PC with a broadband connection. All you need is your username and password. Once editing is completed you can publish your videos to a web page or mobile phone, make an EDL for an online, or play the sequence out via firewire.

The interface has the Avid-style Source and Record monitors. Your uploaded clips appear in folders and almost everything is drag and drop. The folders containing your clips incorporate a Google-style search engine. Logging can be carried out by playing through a clip and typing comments in real time. When the clip is finished playing you can export the logs as Avid compatible ALEs, CMX 3600 EDLs or human readable versions. And with anyone with access to the password having access to your clips, theoretically you could have any number of loggers working on the same project at one time.

The interface is designed to be as intuitive as possible. For instance, a left mouse click on the frame forward button will move you, unsurprisingly, forward one frame. But a right click on the same button will move you back one frame. This works throughout Forscene, the right button giving you the opposite of the left button. Once you get used to this feature it’s very handy. Most actions are drag and drop, so mark a clip in the source monitor and drag it to the record monitor to insert it on the timeline. When clips are first loaded you see a kind of star field or ‘speckle’ for a couple of seconds as the clip is loaded into cache. This is then replaced by ‘splurge’, a graphical representation of the video and audio.

Video is represented by a thumbnail of the frame and audio by a shade of grey – dark grey for quieter sounds and light grey for louder sounds. This makes timeline editing pretty accurate. You’ve got one video track, four audio tracks, a slide track (for stills), a chapter track (which is used to mark chapters when publishing content), and even a colour correction track. Colour correction is carried out by highlighting an area of the picture and click-dragging up and down to adjust brightness and contrast. It’s pretty basic but sufficient for an offline. Further releases of Forscene will reputedly include an improved colour correction tool with a hue offsets feature when you drag left and right. Other standard NLE features can be carried out on the timeline, like trimming, slipping and sliding. You’ve got infinite undos and discarded files are kept in the recycle bin for 31 days.

It is promised that future releases will be able to handle uncompressed DV. If Forscene catches on I can see how this could have some impact on newsgathering. A news crew could shoot material remotely and upload it to their Forscene account. It can then be edited and output via firewire at DV quality, ready for broadcast. Images from camera phones are beginning to become more common in news broadcasts and Forscene will soon be able to use stills and video uploaded directly from mobile phones to your account.

There are plenty of things that are unique about Forscene. Because the program is held on a central server, there is no installation needed on your PC. And you don’t have to wait for a new version for bugs to be fixed. Call up Forbidden and the bug can be fixed before most people know it’s there. The same goes for new features. As soon as a new version of the software is put on the site by Forbidden, it’s available to everyone. Which will save you a lot of time if you’re running it on multiple systems. Future releases should also include audio levels and dissolves, real-time publishing (at the moment it takes a few minutes) and basic video effects.

It is the intention of Forscene to “transform the post-production industry,” and it all sounds pretty revolutionary. The idea is that you’d cut your offline in Forscene, then output an EDL and online your programme at a facility. But there are drawbacks. If you want to input non-firewire material, Digibeta for instance, you’ll have to buy yourself a Linux compressor, which takes S-Video or composite inputs. This will cost you £3000 to buy plus £200 a month service and maintenance. And don’t forget the standard £1 a minute ingest charge. So if you’re inputting large amounts of material, the costs will soon add up. Also, any music tracks that you want to use must first be turned into AVIs before they can be uploaded, which is a bit of a hassle. Forbidden promises that future releases will run on lower spec machines, but as it stands a 3GHz PC with 512MB RAM may be a bit much to ask of the average office or hotel.

Perhaps an even more difficult obstacle for the company to overcome than hardware and software limitations is resistance from editors to the radical change in workflow. If editors work remotely from their producers, only receiving feedback in the form of typed notes on the timeline, some of the dynamic will be lost. I can see advantages to Forscene in terms of logging, newsgathering and client approval. But its major challenge is persuading editors that this is a better way to work.

Gavin Ames
Gavin Ames is a senior editor at Frontline TV. At the moment he's onlining on a documentary series for Sky One. He is an active filmmaker and is currently working on a drum and bass documentary and club visuals for ALT*CTRL in Brixton.