As seen in Content + Technology Magazine
Sydney, July 2011 – Australian media digitisation specialist DAMsmart is leveraging the integration between Digital Rapids encoding solutions and Front Porch Digital’s SAMMAsolo film and videotape migration platform to provide superior-quality, automated, multi-format archiving services to its discerning clientele.
SAMMAsolo – which became part of Front Porch Digital’s offerings with the company’s acquisition of SAMMA Systems in 2008 – is a patented migration system designed to provide archive-quality migration of film and videotape content to multiple file formats, including JPEG2000, in one single pass. This automated method of migrating analogue and digital content to digital files preserves the legacy of archives and brings content out of retirement. When designing SAMMAsolo to cater to the increasingly broad and demanding formats required by archivists and broadcasters, SAMMA Systems selected Digital Rapids’ encoding cards and software for integration into the system. Initially incorporating Digital Rapids’ DRC-1400 hardware with the accompanying Digital Rapids Stream software, Front Porch Digital has recently moved to Digital Rapids’ newer Flux hardware for the latest generation of SAMMAsolo.
“We chose Digital Rapids because they offered the most comprehensive SDK for our integration, and their codec support was the widest available by far,” said Chi-Long Tsang, VP of Engineering, SAMMA Products at Front Porch Digital. “We integrated the Digital Rapids solutions into SAMMAsolo with the most useful codecs and wrapper formats for our users, including Adobe Flash, QuickTime, Windows Media, MPEG-4, MPEG-2, IMX and MXF.”
One such user is DAMsmart, Australasia’s leading specialist provider of audiovisual digitisation services. Established by Managing Director, Ron Anderson, with offices in Canberra, Sydney and New Zealand, DAMsmart is committed to providing cost-effective solutions for the digitisation and management of audiovisual content for commercial and preservation purposes.
Through the development of a high-end and large-scale audiovisual digitisation platform – the largest of its kind in the southern hemisphere – DAMsmart is able to migrate content from a wide range of analogue video and film carriers into an array of digital formats. DAMsmart’s custom workflow and production capacity affords the business a unique ability to migrate large amounts of content quickly and efficiently – exemplified recently in the company’s digitisation of over 55,000 hours of digital content in 12 months for the Australian Parliament. In addition to digitisation services, DAMsmart provides customers with a hosted Digital Asset Management (DAM) service, offering secure digital archiving of audio-visual collections via web access, incorporating full search, view, shotlist, transcode, output and delivery functionality. DAMsmart is an advocate of open standards and the use of JPEG2000 for preservation.
“We employ the SAMMAsolo product from Front Porch Digital with Digital Rapids encoding to migrate large collections with quality control, uniformity, and with the high quality encoding that Digital Rapids provides,” said Ron Anderson. “We needed encoders that would give us the ability to provide the various file formats that clients request for a range of uses, such as archiving, production workflows in various operating systems as well as formats for viewing at the consumer level.”
DAMsmart is currently running 16 SAMMAsolo systems incorporating Digital Rapids cards and software. Seven of the systems are running continuously 24×7 in a SAMMArobot deployment, an automated high throughput migration robotic system that provides up to 1000 hours a week of videotape content conversion, encoding from Betacam SX tapes to the IEC DV format in an MXF wrapper. Nine standalone, semi-automated SAMMAsolo systems are configured to encode in the varying formats requested by DAMsmart’s clients, such as 25Mbs MPEG-2 Elementary Streams for The National Library of Australia, or DV files in optimized MOV wrappers for Prime Television Australia. Video streams are constantly monitored and checked through the SAMMAsolo software, multi-viewer screens, and DAMsmart’s in-house file quality checks. Files are written to Uncompressed TAR on LTO4, transferred to NAS for delivery to the customer, or hosted in DAMsmart’s digital archive.
Digital Rapids reseller Quinto Communications, as well as Front Porch Digital, have supplied Digital Rapids hardware and software to DAMsmart.
“The Digital Rapids encoding solutions play a critical role in our migration workflow, encoding the digitised video stream into high quality, standards based files,” said Anderson. “Multiple output files are created simultaneously, from uncompressed archive masters, mezzanine level production elements, through to streaming proxies ready for the Web. We have complete input and output flexibility. Composite, S-video, component and SDI inputs to SAMMAsolo are encoded through the Digital Rapids technology to formats including IEC DV or IMX in MXF, 50Mbps I-frame MPEG-2, uncompressed MOV and AVI, H.264 in MP4, DV in MOV, WMV and more. In addition to using the Stream software interface for configuring format profiles to our customers’ specific needs, we also use it for video processing including de-interlacing, watermarking, timecode overlay and cropping.”
“The Digital Rapids encoding hardware and software give us the high quality, 24×7 reliability and format flexibility we need to meet our top-tier clients’ requirements,” concluded Anderson.
Visit http://www.damsmart.com.au http://www.digital-rapids.com and http://www.quinto.com.au