Adobe begins their annual all-things-Adobe conference known as “Adobe MAX” today, October 18th, in Los Angles as both an online and in-person event.  They are using the occasion to announce new Frame.io Camera to Cloud internal integrations with both Fujifilm and RED.  Lots of new technology innovation is introduced at Adobe MAX for the vast suite of Adobe creative products, including updates to Illustrator, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, and many more, but the one thing I have been paying particular attention to is Frame.io.  Ever since my friend Michael Cioni, Senior Director, Global Innovation for Creative Product at Adobe joined Frame.io, (now part of the Adobe family,) he has been on a mission to create a new path to connect the production community to the cloud. As he explains it, that is “because for the past 100 years of film and video production, we lived with the inconvenient disruption of needing to download or ship some sort of physical media in order to edit or share it.”  He has worked tirelessly with other companies including Teradek, Panavision, Atomos, Sound Devices, and FiLMiC Pro to integrate use of Camera to Cloud, or “C2C” into their products. There are now dozens of partnerships, and I’m very excited to tell you about the latest with Fujifilm and RED cameras. Complete C2C integration is now built into the mirrorless Fujifilm X-H2S and the RED Digital Cinema’s V-RAPTOR and V-RAPTOR XL camera systems.

If you’ve got the bandwidth, productions that shoot on stages can deliver original camera files (OCF) directly to the post house as they’re being shot, or proxies can be sent so that post production can be simultaneously working with creatives while they are still on set.  Virtual productions or complex visual effects can send OCF directly to the VFX house. ProRes files can be automatically delivered right to production offices and cutting rooms for immediate editing. And for productions that want the highest quality dailies, RAW video and audio files can be synced, color corrected, and transcoded in the cloud.  It’s a workflow designed to support high-end, professional cinema workflows by providing many of the same benefits of an OCF-to-cloud workflow, but requiring less network and processing infrastructure. ProRes files are supported for playback on Frame.io, so these high-quality files are available to view, share, and edit without requiring additional transcoding. This means you’ll be able to shoot 8K RAW with a frame-accurate ProRes proxy and upload the 8K RAW, the proxy (or both), as fast as your internet allows.

Although the mirrorless FUJIFILM X-H2S is an excellent motion capture devices, I would say it is primarily designed for the highest quality imagery for professional still photographers. It is the world’s first digital pro stills camera to natively integrate with Frame.io Camera-to-Cloud. When paired with the FT-XH file transfer attachment, which connects to the base of the camera and is about the size of an old film power winder, it  can upload stills, ProRes and proxy video files.  The expected firmware release date for both the X-H2S & FT-XH is Spring 2023.

As bandwidth improves, the expectation for immediate access to footage will become the most vital component to an efficient workflow. By evolving the technology to include in-camera automatic file transmission, these companies are making enormous strides toward accomplishing this goal for productions of all types, sizes, and budgets. The only problem I can see is that they’ll have to come up with a new term for “Dailies.”  See Michael Cioni explain the importance of these new integrations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL_lEufIvKI