Webcast Video Production

How Qumu Helps The Video Production Professional

Imagine as a video production specialist you are able to simultaneously control 3 live broadcasts, all originating outside your company headquarters, delivering hundreds of on-demand video assets, and rebroadcasting yesterday’s CEO broadcast to Asia, while you are working on projects for next week. Sound impossible?

Qumu products and services help Video Production teams streamline video management and the publishing workflow to ensure success through automation of many critical steps in the video lifecycle. It’s not uncommon for Qumu customers to let individual managers run their own event where previous live broadcasts solution would have consumed an entire production crew. Common issues that prevent video production teams from expanding their video capabilities beyond single event management include:
  • Lack of automation of routine tasks that incorporate a live broadcast
  • Insufficient video resources beyond high-end corporate studios
  • Inability to control video devices and physical IT infrastructure
  • Managing access to proper video content through authorized access
  • Ensuring video assets are delivered to appropriate audiences using proper bit rates and formats
These and many more issues are preventing video production teams from turning their “high cost, low volume” video studio into a “low cost, high volume” automated solution that can benefit thousands of employees. Let’s look at a few of these issues and corresponding solutions in depth:

Pre-Production Support

Pre-production usually involves preparing content (scripts, storyboards, graphics, sound, video inserts) and preparing equipment (sets, cameras, video/audio support units). Typically, the quality of a video event depends on the amount of planning and preparation that goes into it, so the pre-production step often requires the most time and effort. With Qumu, many of the repetitive or non-technical tasks can be delegated to departmental users to help keep the video production team focused on the most critical pre-production tasks. For example, with the Qumu Video Control Center, if any of the metadata changes, such as speaker names, titles, descriptions, etc., this information can be easily edited by the departmental “customer” through an easy-to-use browser based interface. The portal and player pages are updated automatically after editing.

Reliability and Scalability


During a critical live video event, the last thing a video production team wants to manage is a burst of incoming questions about not being able to connect or poor quality of the video experience. Qumu provides multiple levels of failover to ensure a reliable experience for the end users and the production team.

  • The Qumu Video Control Center can be installed in a clustered multi-tiered environment to ensure adequate scalability.
  • The Qumu MediaNet and VideoEdge products provide automatic routing of user requests to the closest streaming edge server, and failover to the second closest server. It uses automatically-generated server-side playlists to implement a robust level of failover across the network.
  • Similar scalability can also be accomplished using Qumu integration with content distribution network (CDN) partner technologies, such as Riverbed, Cisco ACNS and Blue Coat and external CDNs like Akamai and AT&R iCDS.

Post-production Editing

The post-production phase of a live broadcast is primarily the review and archiving of the broadcast. For an on-demand video production, post-production is where the production-ready video segments are edited to produce a final product. With the Qumu Capture Studio or Qumu Video Control Center, built-in editing functionality saves time when editing the video clip for VOD distribution. Additionally, in cases where editing is not required, the archive of a live video event can be instantly published.

Enabling End Users

For many video production teams, the volume of requests from various departments is continually rising with the overall demand for video. For many, becoming a bottle neck for company use of video is a significant concern. Thus, enabling end users to perform non-technical tasks can have a dramatic impact on the video production team’s ability to scale. For example, providing departments with their own Qumu Capture Studio appliance to create video content without any video production assistance can be extremely valuable. This allows the video production team to focus on the very large scale events that require a higher level of control and production.

Flexibility for end users is also provided through a wide support list of PC platforms, browsers and player types, including mobile devices. Qumu can help ensure that a satisfactory user experience is achieved for all users, yet incorporate the desire by IT to reduce impact on the shared corporate network.