In year one, Backlight doubles down on innovation that enhances user experience and streamlines media management and collaboration

Global media and entertainment technology company Backlight announced the latest updates and integrations across the Backlight Creative product lines. Since its public launch nearly one year ago, Backlight has made continuous investments in innovation to enrich its solutions which are used by creatives across every stage of the content creation and management process —including ftrack, iconik, Celtx and Gem

“Our solutions are trusted as core elements in the creative workflows of a variety of enterprises as well as leaders within media and entertainment,” said Mike Green, CEO of Backlight Creative, the division of Backlight that provides software solutions for secure and efficient media management, production tracking and creative collaboration. “Because our solutions are used by such a wide variety of sectors and industries we consciously build our modular solutions to be flexible while adhering to top security standards, and remaining accessible to all levels of users.”

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New Updates Across the iconik Product Line

iconik customers trust the leadling cloud-native Media Asset Management (MAM) and collaboration solution to provide visibility into all of their media across a range of workflows and storage. iconik’s Q2 release (Spring 2023) will increase the breadth of scenarios in which it can be leveraged due to increased platform flexibility, usability and format support.

Enterprise-Class Capabilities for Media Asset Management

Enterprise-scale organizations or agencies with teams working across multiple projects will benefit from new features delivering increased flexibility and security.

• Multi-domain Support: It is now possible to use one email address or user account to log in to numerous iconik instances or domains. This lets iconik users collaborate on multiple disparate projects with their single user ID and password.
• iconik Agent Enhancements: Autologin increases the speed with which users are able to authenticate and use the Agent, iconik’s desktop companion, for asset uploading and downloading.
• iconik Shield for Enhanced Security: Launched in Q4, Shield offers log data of any usage of the iconik system and granular permissions around what user domains are permitted or forbidden from accessing certain assets.

Expanded File Format Support

Backlight has integrated iconik with ecosystem partners to enable support for more file formats and camera sources.

• EditReady Server Integration: iconik is announcing support for Hedge’s EditReady server which means iconik can now transcode footage to an editable format, such as RAW file formats out of the box. Customers using Nikon, ARRI, RED cameras or similar, can preview that output in iconik’s database.
• Accurate.video integration: iconik users can now access advanced content processing functionality from Codemill’s Accurate.video solution such as logging, curation, validation, QC, and media segmentation, with just one click.

Improved User Experience

Two core activities that customers perform with iconik have been elevated – search and media review.

• Enhanced search: Users of iconik’s powerful search functionality can get image and video previews in their results, more metadata, and more customization options for how search results are displayed
• Flexible media review: Users of media review and approval workflows can zoom in on media for markup and commenting – even to a full screen view.

iconik <> Wildmoka Bi-directional Integration

Backlight Streaming’s Wildmoka solution is used to create, manipulate and distribute live streams and it is now integrated with iconik.

• Users can register assets into iconik’s media management system from any live event running through Wildmoka.
• Users can pull assets from iconik into Wildmoka for use in editing and distribution workflows.

iconik <> cineSync Integration Streamlines Collaborative Review

Backlight Creative’s cineSync product is the industry standard for high-end, color-accurate media review and approval and it is now integrated with iconik for media management and file sharing.

• From the cineSync application, users can browse media in iconik and load that media into cineSync for synchronized review and share files to a partner’s machine to prepare for a cineSync review session.
• Additionally, inside the iconik UI, users can select a media and launch a cineSync session for review with one click.

New Updates Across the ftrack Product Line

Ftrack’s award-winning solutions for production tracking and collaboration will address more use cases and customer workflows with new feature enhancements.

New File Transfer Options and Review Types for cineSync

cineSync’s 5.3 release offers new file transfer options including ftps/stfp and iconik, support for audio-only reviews, and greater scalability, speed and responsiveness thanks to upgrades to cineSync’s underlying player technology.

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More Flexibility and Usability for ftrack Studio

A variety of new features in ftrack Studio have rolled out to provide more control and security.

• Along with UX improvements like a new sidebar, Studio’s new Status Permissions delivers workspace administrators more control in the form of specific and granular permissions around Tasks, Versions, Shots, Assets and other objects tracked in ftrack.
• Split Tasks is a recent enhancement that lets users divide tasks into segments to be scheduled and completed in parts rather than continuously to allow for flexible switching between tasks or approval milestones.

Additional Security Options for ftrack Review

ftrack Review has added more flexibility in its approach to security.

• Administrators now can implement content watermarking, default link sharing restrictions, and additional passphrase management.

Today’s announcement highlighting new product enhancements from Backlight Creative follows the March release of Backlight Gem, Backlight’s narrative design platform for interactive storytelling. Gem’s presence at Game Developers Conference 2023 showcased how game studios are leveraging a unique, off-the-shelf product to manage and accelerate their technical development process – without worrying about building and maintaining systems themselves.