In Broadcast - June 2018 - 64
64 www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 8 - Issue 6 | June 2018 InFile MAM Embraces Artificial Intelligence Contributing Editor Andy Stout turns his attention to Artificial Intelligence as one of the developing trends to assist with the complexities of efficient Media Asset Management... W hile the headlines at the recent NAB were all elsewhere, it was an impressively fecund show when it came to new versions of Media Asset Management solutions from a wide variety of vendors. And while there was nothing at Vegas to turn this sector on its head, there was enough evolutionary progress and deployment of the major zeitgeist at the show, AI, to make the prospects for future development feel genuinely enticing. Dalet was one of the many companies that were highlighting the increasing role that AI is going to play at many levels in the broadcast industry. After the initial buzz around all things AI last year, 2018 seems to be the year that companies are delivering on the initial hype, and certainly it is at the centre of the company's new Dalet Galaxy 'five'. From new AWS integrations to new editing tools, there's a lot to the new version, but it's the AI features that steal the headlines. According to the company a new AI framework works across the Dalet application stack and "connects, orchestrates and finetunes" purpose-driven combinations of AI models. This enables organisations to construct intelligent workflows that assist users with recommendations, ramp up collaboration with smart matching, and use predictive analytics for better provisioning and automated decision-making. Indeed it's interesting to see some of the technologies more closely associated with the consumer space being deployed in broadcast environments; Dalet Content Discovery, for instance, the first application to use this new AI framework, combining data generated by cognitive services with existing metadata to build smart content recommendations for editorial and creative teams. IPV too was talking AI, adding AIpowered metadata tagging inside the latest version of its Curator software. It's a simple idea - during ingest, integrated-AI word-to-text functionality processes media and uses the output to automatically create and attach metadata to assets - but one that could save significant resource at a key stage of the whole MAM workflow. Elsewhere within the new Curator 2.0, IPV was highlighting its cloud-friendly nature, including the ability to use cloud-integrated editing functions from packages such as Adobe Premiere Pro CC, alongside a host of new features including improved version control, thesaurus search-term functionality, and automated subtitling. SquareBox added many third party integrations to its CatDV New integrations with third party software were also on show at the Square Box Systems booth, the company's CatDV MAM adding support for Avid Media Composer, MediaSilo, Aspera file sharing, and various different parts of the Adobe Creative Cloud offering, including Premiere Pro and After Effects from a dedicated Adobe panel. The new bells and whistles in CatDV include a very useful sounding file path cleaner for removing the sort of invalid characters that can, in the company's own words, "wreak havoc with storage and creative tools downstream." This has been joined by a document/PDF analyser with simple OCR, an MD5 checker, policy-based archives and restores, a dedicated YouTube uploader, various security improvements including two-factor authentication, and an all-new AWS deployment template with proxy playback from S3. Vizrt was one of many companies at NAB touting AWS integration Unsurprisingly given its dominance, Square Box was not the only company to be referencing Amazon. Vizrt announced in Vegas that its Viz One MAM product suite will be available on Amazon Web Services. That though was just the start of it for the company, v6.0 adding 20 new features as well as a newer and simplified licensing model. The client, Studio, has a new 'carbon' theme that brings it into line with the rest of the Vizrt product family, and there's a new option to customise the item overview, an improved rundown page, faster browsing and more. Away from the focus on UX, v6.0 also includes improved data acquisition and optimisation, support for numerous additional file formats, including Sony XAVC UHD and ProRes with 4K, and additional tools for setting up a hybrid cloud infrastructure. Aveco, as well as picking up plaudits for its Ad Juggler at the show, was showing its Redwood Blue and Redwood White integrated playout devices launched at last year's IBC. Integrated tightly into its Astra MAM - and highlighting the fact that no modern technology solution either works in isolation or is bought in isolation - Redwood Blue is a multipurpose video engine designed for ingest, playout and integrated channel origination powered by Harmonic Spectrum tech. Its White cousin, meanwhile, is a graphics and playout engine running on the off-theshelf IT computers. EditShare has very much taken the concept of the cloud and run with it, releasing a software-only version of its Flow MAM that works on third party storage environments such as Avid NEXIS, Storage DNA and Amazon S3. The company says this is more of a re-engineering than a straight port, with a new intelligent media management layer designed for Flow that can manage millions of assets across multiple storage tiers in different locations. Over 500 software updates have made it into the new version of Flow, headlined by a redesigned UI that unifies the user experience across web-based and desktop apps. Also featured are new capabilities to remotely view Avid Media Composer or Adobe Premiere edits in a web browser; Range Markers for enhanced logging and review capabilities; new software licensing with a customer portal and license management tools; and seamless integration with EditShare's new QScan AQC software. EditShare takes its Flow into the cloud Vidispine is now part of Arvato, joining the Bertelsmann Group in November of last year. To what extent the two companies have been able to mesh together their R&D teams in the short space of time since, is unknown, but Arvato was showcasing its Vidispine API as-a-Service. It is the same full-featured API as with the non-cloud version, just on tap and managed by the Vidispine operations team. It brings the usual 'as-a-service' advantages in that users can start small and scale up as needed within a predictable cost structure.