In Broadcast - November 2020 - 50

50

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 10 - Issue 11 | November 2020

InFile

Metadata Matters
Contributing Editor Andy Stout takes
stock of the latest developments in
broadcast and media content workflow
and production control...

A

s content passes through more
companies during the production
process and is consumed on a greater
variety of platforms than ever before,
understanding quickly what you have
on your servers is becoming more
important than ever.
"Lack of common standards is a big
issue in metadata workflows today,"
state IRT metadata experts Madeleine
Keltsch and Uwe Felderhoff, which
seems as good a place to start a
look at metadata in the broadcast
industry at the tail end of 2020 as any.
"Systems in the production workflow
of a broadcasting company - such as
production system, scheduling system,
CMS, archive - use manufacturerspecific metadata models internally.
Naturally, these systems are not
interoperable, so special bidirectional
interfaces have to be built in the
exchange between those systems.
Over the years, countless interfaces
have been realised in a broadcasting
company;
this
amount
grows
strongly with each new system.
When communicating across several
systems, valuable data is also lost, as
systems in between may not be able to
display all data."
The key to sorting this situation
out is, they continue, switching to a
common data model for metadata
exchange, which takes into account
all current requirements of the media
landscape and can also be extended
for new requirements; a lingua franca
if you will.
And, indeed IRT has developed a
common model in close collaboration
with its stakeholders, the German
Madeleine Keltsch,
IRT

public broadcasters.
"The metadata model BMF 2.1
(Broadcast
Metadata
exchange
Format) is tailor-made for the
requirements of ARD as well as
broadcasters in general," Keltsch and
Felderhoff continue. "The framework
for metadata exchange provides an
extensive metadata vocabulary for
television, radio and online production
as well as supporting cross editorial,
cross media and cross location
cooperation through an IT supported
exchange of metadata in a uniform
format. Sub-models can be derived
from this metadata model, which then
only contain those metadata fields that
are required for the specific use case.
Objects, terms and semantic meaning
of the data fields always correspond to
BMF 2.1."
Quite a few workflows in ARD already
rely on BMF today, while metadata
for video file transfer between
broadcasters and between production
companies and broadcasters has relied
on it for some years now. ARD radio
broadcasting is also in the process
of moving over to a system based on
it, while it is also being utilised in a
new project dealing with copyright
information to conform with new EU
regulations.
Julian Fernandez-Campon, CTO at
Tedial, sees it as crucial to harmonise
the metadata being imported in the
syntax and semantic into a 'mezzanine'
metadata format, which is precisely
what the company's Metadata Engine
does.
"Tedial's Metadata Engine imports
and normalizes metadata from
Uwe Felderhoff,
IRT

EVS' C-Next adds flexibility to
live metadata generation

"We now see more
complex hierarchical tag
structures, which allows
to link tags and enrich the
metadata of video clips"
Julien Ocula,
EVS Solution Manager

different sources, agnostic to any
data feed," he explains. "This allows
operators to ingest different metadata
sources and to aggregate and analyse
these sources, providing a real
editorial value to the production
team."
The range of sources is impressive
and includes: Video AI - Face
recognition,
sentiment
analysis,
object detection etc.; Audio AI Speech-to-text in partnership with
Speechmatics'
automatic
speech
recognition technology; External data
sources from service providers such
as StatsPerform; Internal data sources
from Tedial's own logging tools; and
external data sources from service
providers such as StatsPerform, MLB
Gumbo feed or EVS IPDirector logging
data.
"The more metadata that can be
added automatically the better," he
says, with a nod to the increasing
hyper personalisation of broadcast
offerings."This will allow customers to
find and generate more content based
on anything automatically detected
e.g. celebrities, places, sentimental
analysis, actions, etc. This will allow

broadcast production teams to
generate more content with the same
resources tailored to each audience."
EVS Solution Manager, Julien Ocula,
talks of pain points and solutions,
especially when it comes to the
metadata associated with live events.
"During live sporting events,
operators at the venue might update
the metadata of clips after starting
a backup to the broadcast centre,"
he explains. "To avoid losing these
"updated" metadata, EVS has included
in C-Next a metadata merger. This
ensures that these updates are also
reflected in the Production Asset
Management (PAM) of the broadcast
centre, even after the reception of the
clip. Thanks to this and an integrated
panel in their post production tools,
such as AVID Media Composer or
Adobe Premiere, editors can easily

"The more metadata
that can be added
automatically the better"
Julián Fernández-Campón,
Tedial
http://www.inbroadcast.com https://evs.com/en/product/c-next http://www.tedial.com https://www.irt.de/de/home
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