Using Camera to Cloud for fast-moving events

Providing coverage of events such as IBC and NAB can be quite a challenge. Not only do you have to contend with the size of the venue and sheer number of visitors; it can prove very difficult to get a decent mobile signal.  But – if you can make it work at NAB, it will work anywhere.

Atomos commissioned YouTuber and video production expert PhotoJoseph to provide social media coverage at NAB 2024. It was an ambitious ask: vertically framed video for social media, edited and posted within minutes, and horizontal 16:9 highest-quality video for later use—from the same interviews. All of this had to function reliably, with questionable connectivity. Quite a challenge, then, which PhotoJoseph solved with the help of an Atomos Shogun, Atomos Cloud Studio, and a raft of ancillary equipment.

The idea was to capture video with a Panasonic LUMIX S5II mounted vertically for social media. It’s a full-frame camera with an open-gate 3:2 aspect ratio. With 6K capture, even vertically mounted, there is still enough resolution to output a full-quality cropped UltraHD horizontal 16:9 version for conventional use.

Creating the workflow

To do this, first, you’ll need to capture footage to your camera’s internal storage and/or an external recorder monitor like an Atomos Shogun. The Shogun encodes your footage in real time to a lower bitrate H.265 file, and connects you through a wired network connection or via Wi-Fi to the internet, so you can access services in the cloud. It can also store a backup copy of your recordings in Apple ProRes or H.265.

The cloud doesn’t have an HDMI connection, so services like Atomos Cloud Studio intermediate your footage with participating C2C platform providers like Adobe (Frame.io), Sony (Ci Media Cloud) and EditShare (MediaSilo). When it’s all set up, the system delivers proxies through the cloud automatically, even while you’re shooting, to your editors’ editing stations. If you lose connection, the Atomos system will resume the upload as soon as it can. As a result, your post-production team receives editable footage within seconds of it being shot – wherever they are in the world.

PhotoJoseph said: “The Shogun creates a proxy file, in real time, of the video it’s receiving over HDMI. It also quickly and simultaneously tries to upload that proxy to the cloud. If the internet connection is slow or constantly dropping, the Shogun will keep trying to push it up, piece by piece. If it completely loses the internet connection, or even if you power-cycle the Shogun, it will just pick up later where it left off. In the best-case scenario, though, where the bandwidth available is greater than the bitrate of the file and totally reliable, the video clips will be uploaded in near real-time while you’re recording – it doesn’t wait until you’ve stopped shooting. This is what we experienced on the NAB show floor!”

The advantage is that your footage can be on social media within minutes of an event. In any competitive situation, the first to publish will have an advantage and will likely get more engagement.

“If the internet connection is slow or constantly dropping, the Shogun will push it up, piece by piece.”

A clear connection

The Las Vegas Convention Center is too busy for a conventional, reliable connection – but luckily, bonded cellular technology comes to the rescue. The principle is simple: bundle multiple cellular data modems together in a single backpack and aggregate their data in a way that looks like a single device.

PhotoJoseph chose the Sclera bonded cellular backpack, which enabled an efficient camera-to-cloud production workflow. “The Sclera backpack gave us such a good link that midway through the first day, we bumped the bitrate from 6Mbit/s to 10Mbit/s. In fact, next year, we may try bumping the proxy to 4K and increasing the bitrate even more,” he says.

For years, brave production teams have tried to cover trade shows like NAB either live, or shortly after footage has been captured. Until recently, the only reliable workflow was to capture footage to a camera or an Atomos monitor-recorder and edit at the end of the day. This meant that it could take several hours from capture to publication or posting.

The situation now is quite different. With a bonded cellular connection providing a high-speed, rock-solid connection to the cloud and a network-connected Atomos monitor-recorder, footage can be edited within minutes of the event and published very shortly afterwards.

PhotoJoseph and his team demonstrated that reliable C2C technology is not only here and available for use now but also that it can be the best way to shoot, edit, and deliver to social media and breaking news outlets for virtually any fast-moving story.