In Broadcast - April 2015 - 39

39

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 5 - Issue 4 | April 2015

InMedia

To QC Or Not To QC?
There Is No Question...
The importance of Quality Control is
underlined by vendors as they head to NAB
offering utilities to eradicate risk, writes
Contributing Editor Adrian Pennington...

Q

uality Control (automated or
not) is a cost in broadcast/
media workﬂows and the primary
reason for investment in this area
is risk mitigation. Service providers
need QC to ensure that Service Level
Agreements are met, and broadcasters
need QC to avoid regulatory breaches.
In either case, the investment is
to protect against, or minimise the
amounts spent on ﬁnes, penalties and
lost revenue. By its nature however,
investment in QC follows the law of
diminishing return - it is not possible
to test for every scenario from editsuite to viewer.
"The question broadcasters or
facilities should therefore be asking is
'at what level of investment in QC tools
are we comfortable with the remaining
level of risk,'" poses Ben Davenport,
Director of Marketing, Dalet.
The next most important question
to answer, he says, is 'what happens
when a ﬁle fails QC' - who and how to
make and record judgment on failed
ﬁles and the possible corrective steps?
"A business rule that simply rejects
failed ﬁles or forces a crude correction
is likely to result in good media being
unnecessarily rejected and/or poor
user experience."
Intervention
Automated QC has to be considered
within the bigger picture of overall

Dalet AmberFin UQC

workﬂow automation which also
involves human intervention where
appropriate. For example, is the QC
system throwing up false negatives?
"You need to know what to do when
the automated QC ﬂags something -
and how to ﬁx it," says Karl Mehring,
Head of Product Architecture, TV
Everywhere, Snell. "It's also key to
have interfaces to a vast and evergrowing set of device drivers, so the
media facility can integrate its own
choice of tools from a wide variety of
sources into its workﬂow efﬁciently."
Some QC systems automatically test
content for unacceptable ﬂaws, but
still require considerable amounts of
manual intervention to repair those
ﬂaws, and yet another pass to conﬁrm
that they have indeed been ﬁxed.
Unfortunately, what compounds the
problem is that manual repairs can
often introduce new errors, which
means that the 'auto' QC process
has to be repeated, sometimes over
and over, and there's precious little
automatic about that at all.
"So there is a risk when considering
an auto-QC product for an otherwise
healthy workﬂow," says Howard Twine,
Senior Sales Manager, Vidcheck. "The
wrong decision can actually slow the
workﬂow down."
Expecting video and audio editors to
be fully conversant with the multitude
of ﬁle-based media formats and their

File compliance workﬂow Vidchecker

delivery speciﬁcations is a big ask. An
editor should be focused on creating
content rather than getting bogged
down in the minutiae of formats and
standards.
"One major online content provider
has a complex list of broadcast/
distribution delivery speciﬁcations
that includes more than 20 different
combinations of "acceptable" video/
audio HD formats," reports Twine.
"So where do you start and, more
importantly, how do you know when
you've arrived at 'acceptable'?
Correct Workﬂow
The risk for facilities in making a
wrong turn around QC investment is
not being able to process valuable
media assets, "or it taking too long
to do, or requiring extensive manual
processes to ﬁx - all of which at the
very least cost time and resources,
and in the worst case, direct loss of
revenue," says Mehring.
"It all comes down to being able to
look at the whole workﬂow and use
the information produced to make
intelligent decisions. For example,
identifying a particular regular source
of regular QC failures and so being
able to ﬁx the issue at source."
According to Ashish Basu, VP, Global
Sales and Business Development,
Interra Systems, the QC tool
should work with other technology
components. If it does not, he
says, then trying to integrate after
installation may prevent the system
from working.
"Secondly, if the tool is not accurate,
a facility risks poor QC results. This
could be worse than having no QC at
all. And, third, if the tool is not robust,
a facility could risk holding up its

workﬂow. A stall before a transcoding
operation, for example, could cost a
facility in time (and money)."
Caption Accuracy
In the US, QC of closed captions,
video descriptions, and languages has
largely remained a manual effort. The
FCC and other standards bodies have
tightened the quality standards for
captions and increased the breadth of
content that must comply. What is the
cost of continuing to do so manually
and what are the costs of ignoring the
problem?
"Regulatory ﬁnes are certainly a
risk, and being able to protect your
business from those is a key factor,
but being able to scale with growing
volumes of content, and meet your or
your customer's quality expectations
can be more important," says Colin
Blake, Senior Sales Engineer, Media &
Entertainment Products at Nexidia.
"Content creators, distributors,
and broadcasters will need to turn
to automated approaches to verify
closed captions, video descriptions,
and languages. Continuing to rely on
manual review or spot checks leaves
you exposed and is not scalable.
"The coverage obtained by spot
checking is insufﬁcient to ﬁnd
problems and these failures will

"...at what level of
investment in QC tools
are we comfortable with
the remaining level
of risk"
Ben Davenport
Dalet
http://www.vidcheck.com/ http://www.dalet.com/
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