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.
http://www.inbroadcast.com http://www.vizrt.com/ http://www.squarebox.com/ https://www.editshare.com/products/flow
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of In Broadcast - June 2018
