HITS

Systems integrator CHESA April 5 debuted Acorn Cloud, a cloud- and software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based media workflow and management platform for creative team collaboration, built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), LucidLink, and Quantum CatDV technologies.

The media asset management platform is geared toward small and midsize creative teams to create, edit, and deliver video content, promising to lower the barrier of entry for creative teams to access collaboration tools for their remote teams. Acorn enables cloud workflows with Adobe Premiere Pro and comes with complete turnkey support.

“As a recognized leader in systems integration serving the media supply chain market, we continuously innovate to fill the needs of client challenges. Our Acorn Cloud SaaS platform adds another option in CHESA’s portfolio to meet these market demands,” said Lance Hukill, chief commercial officer for CHESA.

Acorn sits on CHESA’s centralized control plane Bones, with the company anticipating adoption of the offering by entertainment companies, sports teams, government and ad agencies, and corporate communications departments. “Our current and new clients have been looking for more solutions via SaaS to achieve faster implementation, minimized procurement and supply chain constraints, straightforward, fully managed services, and predictable cost structures,” said CHESA CEO Jason Paquin. “Acorn has come out of our team listening and responding to a growing need in the industry, and we are excited to bring more options to market in this space.”

Functionality of Acorn includes the ingest of assets in bulk, drag and drop ingest with camera card support, live edit, review and edit proxies, log notes about each scene as virtual clips, creation of deliverables quickly for distribution platforms, and more. Support features include comprehensive documentation and video library, an intuitive user interface for rapid onboarding, a complete production asset management functionality, backing by industry-leading media supply chain experts, and support requests within the platform.

CHESA, which has been serving creatives for more than 30 years, has designed, installed, and supported media workflow systems for decades, and chose to collaborate with AWS to allow Acorn’s entire workflow to be in the cloud, including compute, networking, storage, and other AWS services.

“It is inspiring to see CHESA fill an important gap in the media supply chain by creating a content management solution, Acorn Cloud, for AWS customers,” said Ian McPherson, principal of worldwide business development for media and entertainment for AWS. “From big to small organizations, content owners across the spectrum now have a scalable and usable MAM with integrated well-known AWS partners. Simplifying workflows and empowering creatives, while also removing the heavy lifting of operating and maintaining a MAM is what many organizations need right now.”

LucidLink enables Acorn Cloud to support rapid ingest of hi-res footage for immediate access anywhere. “LucidLink is a standard in the media industry enabling real-time, remote collaboration on large files by users and applications from anywhere worldwide. Running on any Amazon S3-compatible object storage makes LucidLink a natural fit for Chesa’s Acorn offering,” said Scott Miller, director of global alliances and channels for LucidLink. “We are excited to be a part of this unique and powerful solution for the companies that want a turn-key service managed by an SI that knows how to make all the technologies work well together.”

Quantum CatDV enables Acorn Cloud to be a powerful media asset management and workflow orchestration platform that provides automation and collaboration tools for large volumes of digital media. Acorn customizes CatDV for features creative teams need.

To learn more about Acorn Cloud, click here. To book a meeting with CHESA at this month’s NAB Show in Las Vegas, contact [email protected].