The fundamental purpose of Video Automation is to provide you the power to Acquire Video, Prepare Video and Play Video. NVerzion provides the software tools for the fundamentals and an ever increasing number of tools to expand beyond the basics. The Graphic below gives you an overview of the process where we see video being brought into the system (or Acquired), then being Prepared and Scheduled for Play out. Beyond these collection of interfaces we see a broad look at other categories of interfaces that you may have a need for such as Asset Management (Actions related to Meta-Data), Storage and Distribution, Monitoring, Machine Control, and 3rd Party Interfaces such as Traffic, foreign databases and even other Automation Systems.
Products and Solutions
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Acquire
In the 'Good ol' Days' most video played from tape, or was generated live. Now a days we are playing most of our video from Satellite or Video Server. Material (Video) enters the system from a variety of means. Many time it is recorded off of 'The Bird' (Satellite), other times it is delivered or produced on tape and NGest'ed into the system. An ever increasingly popular method is to use file transfer. Regardless, material being added to the system requires a means of control to move material into the system and assign it some form of a unique identifier (Material ID). Under most circumstances you will want to add additional meta data (Information) pertaining to the clip at the point the material enters the system.
NVerzion provides a variety of highly configurable tools to enable you to bring material in. For information on these products click the following link Acquire.
Prepare
Under most circumstances, material you add to your system is going to need some form of preparation. Traditionally you will want to insure, or QC, the material that you have added to your system. The ability to load and preview material to check basic quality such as duration as audio, video and duration is all but mandatory.
Beyond this functionality you might want to edit the in and out points (trim) or create multiple segments. Examples of material that might require trimming, or segmenting, would be programs dead recorded from the satellite, or town hall meetings where you do not know the start time, duration or any breaks they might take. In these circumstances, as well as many others, you will have to preview the material and set timing points as necessary. Trimming, and segmenting, is normally done as modifications to the meta data associated with the material. Some high end video servers allow you to create individual (unique file) sub clips from the Mother clip from this meta data.
Another form of preparation would include the idea of transcoding, or 'flipping'. One of the biggest myths in the video industry is that audio/video encoded by one manufacturers equipment can be played on another's. This is almost never true. Material from one format must be converted to match the format of the device you intend to play it from. This requires preparation, and should almost always, include review.
NVerzion provides a variety of highly configurable tools to use to QC' and prepare material. For information on these products click the following link Prepare.
Play / Present
The primary purpose of video is to see it. This might be as simple as telling a tape machine to roll or cueing a video server and telling it to play. This normally includes some meta-data that provides you information as to what is available and informs the automation system as to cue in points and durations provided by the preparation step above.
Beyond the basic theory of cueing and playing you will more than likely require the implementation of series of scheduled events. This 'Presentation' can be as simple as playing one event followed by another, ad infinitum, or it may become a series of complex sub events that would schedule multiple sources to create effects to enhance your presentation. Effects might include, but certainly not limited to, the addition of a bug, a crawl, a fade, a router switch, any number of synchronized events that would provide the desired results.
In most cases you will want some form of verification, or history, of what the automation was scheduled to do and what actually happened. This 'As Run' of events is more than just a simple debugging tool but is, in many cases, how you get paid. In many countries, it is required by law.
NVerzion provides a variety of highly configurable tools to schedule, play or otherwise present video. For information on these products click the following link Play Present.
Machine Control
A fundamental property of any Automation System is the Machine Control. Whether you are Acquiring, Preparing or otherwise Playing, you must have a machine to do it with and you must have some way to control that machine. 'Machines' can be a wide variety of devices. These devices might be a tape machine, video server, cart machine, etc. They might be a A/V router, an effects generator or Master Control switcher. Basically, machines are any device that you might want to control. Normally each machine has its own unique set of commands, or its own interpretation of a set of standardized commands, and a unique interface to each is required.
The better automation systems provide means where multiple software modules can control the same machines, when possible. This is normally accomplished via a network, using a network based control protocol going out to individual computers which are then connected to the machines. The computers take the network messages, translate them into the machines particular protocol, and sends the translated message to the machine. Status from the machine is accomplished in a rather reverse process. The use of a network based machine control protocol allows for unlimited expansion and multiple control to be done from anywhere to anywhere.
NVerzion provides a wide variety of different forms of machine control as well as routers, Master Controls, effects and devices. For information on these products click the following link Machine Control.
Asset Management
Asset Management is a broad term whose actual accounting based definition is somewhat irrelevant when it applies to the management of Video material. When used in the Broadcast industry, or Video related industries, it has more to do with the meta-data associated with Video than it does with the protection of the Video's book value.
The meta data normally shows information as to the history and characteristics of the actual material itself. At a minimum it will include some form of unique ID for the material and where it resides, or what format it resides in/on. Duration, description are almost always included. Segmenting and trimming information are included when needed. Billing information, run dates, delete dates, etc. Owners, rights, editing information and other various items may or may not be included.
An attempt to standardize this meta-data associated with Video has been made for many years but even as the first releases of the so-called 'Standard' were being released, individual modifications of the standard reduced much of the sought after functionality. To date, meta-data does not easily cross from one manufacturer to another, nor from one database to another. Under every circumstance a customized conversion is eventually required.
Asset Management can also include the tracking, distribution and other movements of the material. Pull and dub lists are usually generated to list what material is needed where and when. The management of this movement, or the interface to the system that implements the data movement, is required in any serious Elite Automation System. With the addition of new material into a system, the need for the purge list becomes almost mandatory.
NVerzion provides a variety of highly configurable tools for the purpose of Managing your Assets in the Video industry. For information on these products click the following link Asset Management.
Monitor
The ever increasing demand for the control of Video, coupled with the ever increasing reductions in force, lead to an increasing demand of software that monitors software. This software normally watches the operation of the other software and tries to warn operators, or engineers, when it recognizes a bad situation. These warning might come in the form of warning messages, emails or relay closures that trigger an alarm or equivalent. In certain cases, the software attempts to fix the problem. These fixes might be by causing the programs to restart, starting a backup or taking control.
Similar to the attempts at standardizing Video related meta-data (See Asset Management above), SNMP has been created. Whereas this is a published protocol, each vendor decides which part of the protocol to implement and then adds their own interpretation to it. It is an on going problem with trying to standardize a very dynamic industry. In the end, customization is inevitable.
NVerzion provides a variety of highly configurable tools to monitor and adjust your operation. For information on these products click the following link Monitor.
Archive / Distribute
The Video industry is second only to the National Security industry as the largest generator of information in the world. In the old SDI 8 Mbps day a single hour of video would generate 3.6 GBytes. Now in the HD days we generate over 22 GBytes of data per hour. During a Space Launch, the super high definition cameras used by NASA generate at a rate greater than 1 Peta byte of data per hour. Needless to say, all this data has to be stored somewhere and somehow has to be moved from where it was created, either to where it is to be stored, or where it is to be viewed.
Moving this massive amount of data is one problem, finding an economical means to store it is another. Archive media comes in a wide variety of types. It can be film, rusty vinyl in the form of tape or hard drive, paper and even rock. The most reliable and long lasting is rock, the cheapest and least reliable is paper, the most economical is hard drive. Regardless, the ever changing format, or encryption, of the data implies that it really is storage and not archiving. Egyptian writing on Papyrus and Rock has lasted thousands of years, the video you storing today is more than likely in a format that will not last more than a decade.
When choosing the media, and format, to store your data on you need to consider how quickly you need to retrieve the information and how much man work you are willing to put into supporting the storage. Most 'archive' management software make the entire storage device look like a single file system so moving the data is relatively easy and can be accomplished using an explorer. However, Each Video servers manufacturer stores different files in different locations. The storage of these files, and the eventual restoration, need to conform to the manufacturers format.
As mentioned in the preparation section above, most A/V encoded on a server of one manufacturer will not play correctly on a server of another manufacturer unless you trans-code, or flip, the data. This has led a number of archive / storage providers to include the trans-coding software in their products.
As far as archive management software goes their seems to be two major schools of thought and two major sub-categories of implementation. Centralized storage or distributive storage, Pull technology or Push technology. There are many more advantages to Distributive storage in comparison to Centralized, most notably parallel bandwidth and redundancy. In Pull technology, the end user (or destination) is responsible for requesting, and usually the movement, of the data. In Push technology, the Central hub takes over the responsibility and forces the data on the destination. The Centralized Push model is very popular with insecure totalitarian dictators who are afraid of losing control, whereas the Distributive Pull model is much more efficient and American. NVerzion supports both models but encourages the later.
NVerzion provides a variety of highly configurable tools to Archive, Store and Distribute your material. For information on these products click the following link Archive.
3rd Party Interfaces
The world is full of software. Software development is an art and not yet an engineering science, it is therefore inherently incompatible. The varying types of software that you might find in a single Video Installation usually need some form of integration between them. Traffic, Scheduling, Billing, Archive Management, Automation, to name a few. Sometimes companies try to buy all these solutions from one vendor but even then they usually do not work together without some custom piece of software to interface between.
The simplest form of interface is to have a print out from one software module and have an employee manually implement that on another software module. This is obviously the most inefficient. Therefore the need for 3rd party interface software.
Many interfaces have been implemented before and will work the first time. However, there had to be a first time for everything and you might require a customized solution.
Normally these interfaces have to do with database translation or communication interface between the two products. Traditionally, it is built on top of an existing platform utilizing the experience of writing previous interfaces to develop one for you. Hopefully previous interfaces satisfy 80 to 90 percent of your need so you only need to pay for the remaining 10 to 20 percent. Expect them not to work the way you expected the first time. Be prepared for 3 or 4 revisions before it works the way desired.
NVerzion provides a variety of highly configurable 3rd party interfaces, as well as develops custom interfaces catered for your specific needs. For information on these products click the following link 3rd Party Interfaces.
