Videographers, photographers and animators can now invite prospective clients to view their wares on-line.
Media arts can be stored and viewed on venaca.com, the newest offering from Brooklyn-based Venaca LLC.
Scott Spector, founder and CEO of Venaca, said this site will be ideal for people or companies who want to showcase their video, audio or visual arts.
He added that venaca.com, which is built on a Linux platform, will support all file types. “We’re format and vendor agnostic.”
Spector said the main benefit of venaca.com is that there are no rules on how artists’ work is posted.
“Often, there may not be facilities for the animators to post the concepts themselves. They have to go by the site’s rules,” he said, noting Venaca will allow clients to store full files that can be viewed under any format, the way the client intended.
The site is run on proprietary systems and the focus is storage management and next-generation broadband solutions.
“We’re not like a Web design shop,” Spector said. “Our focus starts with storage management and distribution of digital assets and then we expand from there.”
The site includes elements of digital rights, according to Spector.
“If you have video that you want your family to see, but there are photos that you don’t want family to access, you can control that,” he explained.
The site contains dynamic tracking, meaning that the users only have to remember their own passwords, while the system will update who has access to which parts of their portal.
“We keep track of who’s giving (a visitor) access at any time,” Spector said. “If I’ve put up ten digital assets and I’ve given someone permission to view three, that person will not be aware that there are more assets posted to my account.”
Reka Pigniczky, a freelance news producer from New York, is hoping friends and family from around the world will use this site to view her video and photos.
“It’s nice to think that my family will have access to my work from anywhere,” she said.
Pigniczky stated the site is unique for her because it will soon host full audio and full video, although she noted Venaca still has some bugs to work out to that end.
She said that the huge amount of space used in storing video seems to be causing problems, but she is confident Venaca will overcome that soon.
Pigniczky noted this site will be very useful in her line of work and predicted that most freelance journalists and producers will want to get involved with this site.
“If they get this thing up to speed, the idea that I can be in Romania and upload a story and send it to my client in Germany without packaging a tape is pretty great,” she said.
She added that users are going to need to have high-speed Internet connections for this site to be used to its full potential.
Spector said that at minimum users would need the macromedia Flash plug-in, but for video they will have to have the respective video player.
He also noted that there will be two sides to venaca.com, the consumer side and the commercial side. The consumer side will involve users like Pigniczky, but the commercial side would be useful for corporations who have to share video or audio information on a company-wide scale.
“There is a very close relationship to what we do on the consumer side and the commercial side,” he said. “The beauty of it is that a lot of the creative ideas are driven by the consumer-oriented applications, but they carry over to the commercial side.”
Spector did note that many of the features available for the commercial use of the site are being toned down for the consumer side. The users will have to pay a subscription fee and hosting charges, he said. They will also be able to add more features on a cost-per-feature basis.
