Almost Live from NAB: Axle Video Intros a Rough Cut Editing App

[Note: This sponsored interview was recorded at NAB 2015.]

Axle Video had a surprise for fans of its radically simple media management tools at this year's NAB conference: It announced an iOS app that lets video pros create rough cuts on-the-go and then send video to a server for rendering.

"Here at the show we're announcing our first native iOS application," said Axle CEO Sam Bogoch. "Our stuff has always been accessible for mobile devices, so we've had a great iPad interface and so forth, but what we're introducing here is actually a rough cut editing tool that runs either on an iPhone or on an iPad, and what's really neat is that it not only combines media that you may have shot with media that you can search off your asset management system, it also lets you send those to be rendered on a server."

The app makes collaborative mobile editing much more affordable that it was previously.

"It's called Axle Edit," Bogoch continued. "It starts at $795 and it's a multi-user system, so essentially you can have multiple journalists or producers that are all tied into that system working from their iPads in a collaborative way. It's really the kind of thing that a few years ago would have been a multi $100,000 deployment and we're bringing it all the way down to where a small team can just buy it and use it."

For more on what Axle had to show at NAB, watch the full interview below.

Troy:  Hi, everyone. This is Troy Dreier of StreamingMedia.com coming to you almost live from the NAB 2015 floor. I've been pleased to have some conversations with news makers and deal makers here on the floor, and I'm joined right now by Sam Bogoch, CEO of Axle Video. Sam, welcome. Thank you for joining me.

Sam:  Pleasure to be here.

Troy:  Tell us a little bit about Axle for viewers who aren't familiar.

Sam:  Sure. We're a three year old company based in Boston. We have a unique focus in that we're trying to take media management and make it radically simple. We've been growing by leaps and bounds and we're thrilled with the response here at NAB.

Troy:  Media management, what does that mean and how are you simplifying it?

Sam:  That's a really good question. In the last few years video being captured by all kinds of cameras and mobile devices has just been exploding. In fact, today it accounts for more than 10% of the total storage that's being bought for any purpose world wide, just to store all that video. You know where it's coming from. Some of it's being shot here, it's being shot on GoPros and IPhones and you name it. The challenge is when you have all this media, what do you do with it? Do you just pile it up on hard drives and stick them on the shelf, do you try to make it a little more accessible or searchable, and in particular if you're in this business, if you're in the post-production or broadcasting business, how do you get the most value out of that video, because otherwise it is just going to sit on the shelf and you'll have to re-shoot it some day.

Troy:  Are your solutions hardware based or in the cloud?

Sam:  It's actually software. We run on standard hardware, Macs basically, and we work, it's not so much a cloud system as it is an on premises system that uses Cloud technology. The reason for that is that the cloud is an interesting place to archive your media right now and there's a lot of buzz about that, but for day to day work when you shoot stuff your media's not on the cloud. It's on the hard drive or on the SSD where you put it. What people have is in the media need to say, okay, what's on that hard drive, maybe put it on some shared storage with some other hard drives, and then immediately get to work on it. We work right at that initial point of access if you will.

Troy:  Now Axle's pretty active in the mobile space too, right? I hear you might even have some announcements in that area?

Sam:  We sure do. Here at the show we're announcing our first native iOS application. Our stuff has always been accessible for mobile devices, so we've had a great iPad interface and so forth, but what we're introducing here is actually a rough cut editing tool that runs either on an iPhone or on an iPad, and what's really neat is that it not only combines media that you may have shot with media that you can search off your asset management system, it also lets you send those to be rendered on a server. You can do all the work in low-res on your iPad that can really handle it, and then you're rendering it in HD on the server which has the server to send that to air.

Troy:  Well, fantastic. What's that called?

Sam:  It's called Axle Edit. It starts at $795 and it's a multi-user system, so essentially you can have multiple journalists or producers that are all tied into that system working from their iPads in a collaborative way. It's really the kind of thing that a few years ago would have been a multi $100,000 deployment and we're bringing it all the way down to where a small team can just buy it and use it.

Troy:  That's amazing. That's in the iTunes store right now?

Sam:  It is going to be in the iTunes store in about three weeks.

Troy:  Okay.

Sam:  We're just putting the finishing touches on it.

Troy:  All right. If you're watching this, take a look. It might be there now. If not it will be there soon. You also had a big announcement related to Boris Effects if I remember.

Sam:  That's right. Last week we announced with Boris Effects a deal where essentially they took a strategic stake in our company and in exchange we took ownership of some code that they had for translating editing software formats, so you can take, for instance, an AAF for media composer and translate that into a sequence for after effects or premiere and vice versa, and it also supports Final Cut 7, so a very powerful tool set and we have several purposes in that. First of all, we want to make sure that we're able to upgrade that and make it available to a wider pool of editors. Second of all we want to take some of that technology and embed it into our media management solution. Right now we're really great at handling clips and whatever footage you had, we'd like to get equally good at handling the sequences that you put together so that we could catalog those and, for instance, figure out from a sequence what materials you should bring back from archive if you want to rerender that sequence on your computer.

Troy:  Nice. Very advanced.

Sam:  Yeah, pretty cool.

Troy:  For a three year old company you guys are really hitting your rounds.

Sam:  We are getting very busy. The growth has been tremendous. Our sales more than doubled last year. Sales for the first quarter this year were larger than the first half of last year so you get the overall trend. I think the real take home here is that media management does not have to be big and scary anymore. We can call it radically simple media management and we mean it. This is software you can install in an hour or two. You don't have to be specially trained, and the range of people that we have using this is everything from the big broadcasters who have small work groups who need this all the way down to small independent teams for things like indie work or reality shows. There they're just using it on set in whatever way makes sense.

Troy:  That's amazing. Well, I hope our viewers check it out. That sounds really impressive.

Sam:  Yeah. Just to repeat, it's AxleVideo.com.

Troy:  Fantastic. Well, check it out, people. Thank you very much for joining me. This is Troy Dreier coming to you from NAB 2015.

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