Remote Collaboration As It Should Be - Introducing Jellyfish Media Engine, Kyno for Jellyfish & Lesspain Media Engine

Our partner LumaForge announced a few weeks ago that they will ship their renowned flagship shared storage product, the Jellyfish, with a new browser-based application, called Jellyfish Media Engine as well as a team license for our award-winning video workflow and media management app Kyno.

Jellyfish Media Engine is a remote interface to your storage enabling users to visually browse their Jellyfish volumes remotely via thumbnails and proxies generated on the fly or in advance through a very user-friendly browser app.

This entire process is tightly integrated with Kyno which picks up all the cache data like thumbnails and technical metadata generated by Jellyfish Media Engine. This way Kyno users browsing a Jellyfish volume have an accelerated user experience because none of the original, potentially high-bitrate media data, needs to be accessed and transferred over the wire to use Kyno's popular drill-down function with searching and filtering. This is great in a local shared storage set-up but it becomes a game-changer when accessing a Jellyfish volume from your home office via Jellyfish Remote Access!

Jellyfish Media Engine was developed using our Lesspain Media Engine, which is a B2B product that contains the media processing engine that powers Kyno. It ships as a simple stand-alone runtime with a REST API available for Mac, Linux and Windows, so it can be integrated very easily into server, cloud or desktop products. It features media analysis and metadata extraction, very flexible thumbnail and filmstrip extraction as well as transcoding with all the format support, flexibility and robustness video professionals appreciate from Kyno.

"Working with Lesspain Media Engine was a breeze. The API is very thought-out and well-designed. You can feel that it has been designed by someone who has been building media management systems for a long time. The docs are exemplary. Things worked right out of the box and when we did run into issues or had questions the Lesspain team was instant and spot on with their feedback" says Jake Landon Schwatz, Lead Software Engineer at LumaForge and in charge of the development project for Jellyfish Media Engine.

"Working with the team at Lesspain was awesome. They played a very active role not limited to just support, suggesting solution approaches or advising us in product decisions. It really felt like they were part of our team." says Gergana Angelova, VP of Product and Customer Experience at LumaForge and a principal champion and driver of the entire initiative.

Lesspain Media Engine was built exactly for cases like these - giving a company an advantage in time-to-market to implement an innovative idea for a media related software product. Getting the media-related heavy lifting right isn't something you can do in a few months time with the vastness and complexities of todays ever-evolving media file formats. It requires a dedicated team of specialists, if you want to get it right.

Lesspain Media Engine eliminates that crucial part of the software project from the creators' list of things to worry about, by building on mature software components that have been battle-tested in hundreds of thousands of hours of real-world production use over more than six years.

Lesspain Media Engine is being actively developed and is already in use in multiple 3rd-party products including cloud, desktop and on-premise server solutions.

This latest step in the direction of making Kyno a hub in remote collaboration workflows, after having established it as the collaboration tool for production teams on shared storage for the past five years, is no coincidence. If you follow us on YouTube and social media you have seen this focus over much of the last two years with collaborations and integrations with Frame.io, Dropbox, LucidLink and Postlab. This is a strategic priority for us and has been even before Covid 19, which has surely accelerated it.

The "classic" cloud approach, putting everything into cloud storage and moving the workflow step-by-step and tool-by-tool into proprietary web interfaces is what's dominating many industries. In our industry, that of video or cross-media production, this is very challenging, primarily for these reasons:

• The size of files is often enormous, even in the Gigabit/s range. Even with optimistic projections regarding 5G introduction and general bandwidth development large parts of the world and the industry will simply have to deal with original material being processed primarily on local/on-premise machines
• The tools we use are very complex and for many of them, especially NLEs, we have invested years or decades in improving our skills, optimizing the tool chains and workflows and that's not something you throw away easily.

That's why we see an alternative trend picking up speed, especially in the video industry where many people and organizations want to keep their established way of working, using the proven tools they feel comfortable and efficient with and just solve the problems of distributing the data via cloud/internet technologies. Examples of this are LucidLink, Postlab (especially with their latest offering Postlab Drive) and now LumaForge with Jellyfish Remote Access and Jellyfish Media Engine.

This approach is a natural fit for Kyno. The entire architecture is built for that:

• cleanly separating management of media files, cache data, descriptive metadata and index data
• optimizing the UI for higher-latency storage
• built-in support for proxy workflows
• flexibility with regard to workflow variations
• high degree of integrateability with other tools

You can rely on us continuing on that path, keeping Kyno your central workflow hub that you use for managing/integrating anything relevant in your professional video workflow, starting with SD cards but also including all other drives, shared storage of any kind as well as cloud storage or services.

Exciting times ahead!