Blackbird, which specializes in cloud video editing technology, regularly works with some of the world’s biggest broadcasters and events (think Olympics, World Cup), enabling them to edit live footage. With their Elevate.io solution, Blackbird is bringing its cloud video R&D, along with its fast online video codec, to content creators large and small.
Elevate.io is a browser-based editing solution that allows users to upload video to the cloud and then edit it without any desktop software. The tool is free, with limited storage, and additional “paid” subscriptions expand the offering. To prove the point of how accessible it is, Elevate.io chief product officer Sumit Rai says the company performed a test, purchasing a $150 Lenovo Chromebook, which proved more than capable of taking full advantage of the tool. Rai, whose background includes time with software developer Vegas Pro, as well as in the streaming business, thinks Elevate.io is a natural transition to using the cloud for content creation.
“Look at the trend of every other industry,” he suggests. “Design has gone online with Canva at the lower end; Figma at the higher end. 3D for film and television is going online on Shape...Everything’s in the browser. Everything’s being stored (in the cloud), and every industry is moving that way. Why? It’s the SaaS move. It’s the ease of convenience — the backup. You just don’t have to worry about anything. And more importantly, with almost all those products — and probably spearheaded in our opinion by the Google suite — was the collaboration element. The idea that I can be working on something and you could be working on something, and we can work on it together.”
Cloud workflows, says Rai, are being embraced, and the move to cloud storage is also gaining acceptance.
“When we started this project, ‘cloud’ was a bit of a bad word,” he reveals. “Now it’s just a given. I don’t think people have an issue with it in any way, shape or form. There’s going be a lot more comfort in people saying, ‘This can be not only our working system, but also our archive system.’ We don’t have it yet, but we will be introducing a second layer of archive, which is where you’ll be able to put the content you have into [Glacier] storage. And in doing that, we become so significantly cheaper than if you try and buy any kind of backup system.”
Rai recently sold off his personal storage solution — a 96TB drive — and feels consumers, which will be the initial customer for Elevate.io, are already comfortable with the concept of streamed video and the cloud. As Elevate.io becomes more familiar to content creators, he sees its use moving up to the prosumer and media professional levels.
“Movies are on-demand,” he points out. “You’ve got Netflix, Apple TV, Spotify. The music’s coming on-demand. Everything’s cached fairly locally, so regular stuff is there. I just feel like we’ve made the consumer move.”