Anyone who’s ever worked a project that required the acquisition of large amounts of footage that must be quickly organized and cut down to a manageable 30-minute or one-hour show can use a little reality – Lanterna Magica’s Reality video indexing and logging system, to be exact, which lets production companies spend 30 percent less time in the edit suite. And, as we all know, time is money.
Developed by several custom software developers and led by CEO Pierre Rinfret and CTO Jean-Denis Gingras, Reality is designed to streamline the production of non-scripted television shows or other documentary projects, where shooters can sometimes go through six or eight 90-minute cassettes per day. The footage can be HD or SD, and files encoded in Windows Media 9 format can be emailed for approval to anyone in the world.
The company calls it a Web-based "video content description system" that supports an unlimited number of camera feeds. It’s currently in use in Canada for that country’s talent-search show, Star Academy. Using two Reality workstations, producers and editors working on the show’s daily frenetic workflow can access footage at any time, from any location, well before shooting is finished, and create shortcuts to access the content – even individual frames if so logged – quickly.
Delivered as a turnkey system to your set or production facility, it includes a PC-based computer workstation with the Reality software already loaded and is available for rent at $4,000 per week.
Reality lets directors preview hours of raw footage from multiple cameras quickly and make shot-selection decisions in minutes. Daily reels/cassettes can be encoded, logged, viewed, browsed, and searched using automatically generated metadata while shooting is in progress, saving post-production time and a lot of headaches. In fact, the entire production is always available to search, play, and browse, even as more content is being ingested.

Camera feeds can be distributed to a variety of devices, including tape decks, digital disk recorders, and to the Logger, Reality’s RAID-protected storage array. The Logger stores audio and video signals and generates its own time-code data to produce low-res versions automatically, every three minutes, for browsing. These clips are synchronized with the time codes and content descriptions entered by operators on the set, which can be easily searched via picons and individual scenes recalled at will.
Search results appear as thumbnails with descriptions and can be played out immediately. In and out points are easily marked and compiled into a cuts-only EDL that can be imported as a CMX file into most NLEs.
When a production is completed, the production company owns all of the footage, but not the ability to search it using specific tools within Reality. In order to repurpose the logged footage, they’ll need to buy a license from Lanterna as part of an indexing service the company has launched to search the archived database.
For more information, visit www.lanternamagica.com.