The birth of Glympse

Why Crafting My Own Solution for Viewing Camera Rushes Was Essential: The C word.

Looking back a the pandemic and the global lockdowns, it seems more like a fever dream then something we all went through. There were huge challenges to over come for everybody, one of my own personal/professional challenges came in the form of moving our entire production workflows from fully in house to fully remote, almost overnight.

I work in Television post production, and am part of the tech team that keeps the editors up and running. watching the news way back in 2020, we knew that we were likely to need to come up with some sort of workflow for migrating our edits to work from home.

It became apparent relatively quickly that hybrid workflows were here to stay and we needed something more flexible than our current workflows.

We could either spend thousands buying more licenses for the software we were using. But as they tied the license to a specific user account on a specific PC, this wouldn't work for freelancers as they come and go far too often and the costs would become astronomical. Or we could spend thousands buying a dedicated server for viewing rushes. Solutions did exist back then, but they were few and far between and the costs were in the tens of thousands and they only supported a handful of streams.

I thought there must be a better way, I was no stranger to streaming with my media server, and wondered if there was a way I could use Plex or Jellyfin to stream the rushes. But it was apparent this wouldn't work very quickly.

I set out to find a solution, but I had very specific requirements if it was going to work:

• Rushes must be organised in the same way as they were stored on our NAS
• it must be easy to navigate and find rushes
• There should be some way of viewing the camera timecode as the clips are playing
• You must be able to change the audio track of the camera to listen to different mics individually.
• it must be secure and users should only have access to the projects they are working on

There wasn't anything that fulfilled all of these requirements. I could find some but not others, so I decided that I could and should build my own solution.

So in the background whilst continuing my normal tasks I worked on a solution until I had something ready to present.

Glympse was born.

Glympse features:

• Same pane of glass for in office/WFH
• locks users down to only the projects they need
• Scans for new rushes on our NAS
• Transcodes all the rushes to a HLS stream for easy streaming
• allows audio track switching for clips that have multiple audio tracks
• displays camera timecode as the clips play
• shows related clips, (Clips from different cameras on the same shoot that happen at the same time)
• transcribes rushes and allows uploading files to be transcribed, gives timecoded transcripts that match the timecodes in the edit
• allows editing transcripts
• allows uploading of clips directly
• review files and mark for approval

This solution has now been put into production and the company now used Glympse for all it's workflows.