In Broadcast - April 2020 - 62

62

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 10 - Issue 4 | April 2020

InMedia

MAM & Workflow
In the midst of unprecedented events in the global media &
entertainment industry, Contributing Editor Andy Stout examines
the state of play in Media Asset Management workflow technology...

T

hese are, as has no doubt
been mentioned elsewhere
on these pages, highly unusual
times for the industry. The usual
certainties have gone the same
way as the tradeshow cycle, and
decoupled from both, the industry
is in an usual position regarding
innovation. What to announce
when? R&D is still underway, albeit
in straitened circumstances, but
one of the advantages of the ongoing
pivot to the as a Service business model
and all things cloud-based is that the
further companies are down that route
the better placed they are to take
advantage of the current situation.
Dalet is one of the front-runners in
all this. It launched its Media Cortex
at last year's NAB, promising that it
would bring the advantages of AI to
the industry without the weight of
complexity that often surrounds its
implementation. Also it promised to
do this in a pay-as-you-go model and,
which is where it is relevant here,
ensured it featured a range of routines
that tied in to its Galaxy Five
MAM. That means that Galaxy
users have an AI framework at
their disposal that orchestrates
a combination of cognitive
services,
fine-tunes
models,
versions data sets, aligns them
with taxonomies, and can surface
results at various levels of the
application stack when they are
needed.
The company has also been hard at
work on its Ooyala Flex Media Platform
assets having acquired the company in
July last year. The latest OoyalaMAM,
web interface, includes new features
such as advanced asset search
capabilities - including descriptive and
temporal metadata, easy metadata
curation, and tools to organise large
asset collections. It can be
deployed in Amazon AWS, Google
Cloud Platform, and Microsoft
Azure, even on-premises, features
new API enhancements to enable
customers to develop native
plugins, and, what's more, Dalet
has committed to an ambitious
monthly release cycle to support
it.

Dalet Media Cortex

Monthly innovation is one of the
promises the cloud has always held
out. Another, and a very pertinent
one in the current climate, is an
improvement in remote working. And
it is this that has led MAM specialist
IPV to develop CuratorNow, a private
cloud, remote editing studio that
is driven by the company's MAM
expertise. It's been investigating this
area of the business for a while now,
enabling, by way of illustration, global
collaboration from inside Adobe
Premiere projects with full MAM
integration.

VSNExplorer BP (Business Process) editor

IPV's update schedule for its
main Curator MAM product is a still
impressive quarterly one though,
which has allowed it to progress in
leaps and bounds since first release
in 2016. That means it is, according
to the company's own estimates, 9.5x
faster than it was when it launched,
allowing for instant search and a proxy

IPV's Curator

transcode service that operates
8x faster than real-time. The 2.3
release in February added a new
Adobe Panel to make it easier to
find and collaborate on content as
well, and included enhancements
to Curator Connect to enable
bulk-registration of assets, and
the addition of Curator Gateway
to provide boosted security
during deployment and quicker
sysadmin set-up.
One of the latest
developments at VSN
has seen the company
develop the first web
plugin for a MAM
system that allows for
the full customisation
of a news production
work
environment.
Admittedly this is as
much about Newsroom
Computer Systems as it is
about the company's VSN
Explorer MAM system but
it is neat technology anyway and well
worth a mention. Effectively
VSN NewsConnect allows the
visualisation of all the assets and
videos stored in the VSNExplorer
MAM system from within the
interface of the large majority of
NRCS systems. Indeed, it's been
part of a recent theme from
the company that has seen it
integrate a growing amount of
its product line into its MAM offering,
including its VSNCrea cloud-based
traffic scheduling software.
As the company put it back during
IBC, it's looking to move away from
the traditional MAM focus purely on
video management to target emerging
requirements such as providing the
ability to easily preview and manage
images, audio or any other type of file.
To that extent, VSNExplorer's
BPM
(Business
Process
Module) features a new BP
editor that allows the creation,
modification, and customisation
of any business process within a
company, giving more autonomy
to users looking to implement
their own workflows.
Improvements have also been

made to the VSNExplorer BI (Business
Intelligence) module, which can now
access more data sources as well as
providing the option to export the
results in any digital format such as
.docx, .xlsx or .pdf.
Facilis has released version 3.5 of
its FastTracker MAM. Due to debut at
NAB, it added a raft of new features to
the software, including file movement
profiles, duplicate file reporting, and
a secure browse interface. As one off
its main new powerups, FastTracker
can now flush and pre-fetch files
and folders from cloud and LTO
locations through the Object Cloud
feature, while reporting the status of
archived media. Facilis Object Cloud
itself, meanwhile is introducing a new
Multi-site Sync feature that can bring
together groups of editors on the same
file system across multiple locations.

Facilis FastTracker interface

Using the cloud storage included with
the feature, projects can be shared
and linked on remote workstations, as
easily as linking to a local drive.
At the tail end of last year, Vizrt
unveiled new versions of its Viz One
and Studio MAM products, both
reaching v6.3.0. Key highlights of
these releases include Viz One support
for MPEG-DASH, which offers improved
performance for playing and scrubbing
video, which is especially useful when
handling long, multi-hour files such as
sports events. Other additional video
formats have also been included,
notably H.264 video recorded on
mobile devices; H.264 video in square
or vertical aspect ratios; and HEVC
(H.265) video with any aspect ratio
or resolution. Cloud infrastructure
support has also been expanded, Viz
One 6.3.0 adding Microsoft Azure
object storage.
New features of Tedial's Hyper IMF
include component-based assets with
multi-resolution MPEG-Dash streaming
and end-to-end IMF workflows with
third-party systems integrations. At
NAB, the company had planned to
showcase the solution's
http://www.inbroadcast.com https://www.dalet.com/ https://www.dalet.com/ https://www.facilis.com/ https://www.facilis.com/ https://www.facilis.com/ https://www.vsn-tv.com/en/ https://www.vsn-tv.com/en/ https://www.ipv.com/
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