At IBC2007, Snell & Wilcox announced an upgrade to its content mastering and repurposing workstation, the iCR 2.5. The new system is 30 percent faster, supports more video formats and offers automated real-time quality control monitoring.
The iCR 2.5 workstation enables users to create error-free digital masters of their programming and then repurpose that content for distribution on multiple platforms. The version 2.5 release supports new platforms including Apple TV, iPhone, Xbox 360, and Web applications using QuickTime and Flash video.
As much as 40 percent of a typical customer’s ingested content needs to be re-encoded due to quality issues, so the iCR 2.5’s automated QC functionality offers significant time savings and reductions in manual labor in both the stream and file-based domains. The company claims the iCR 2.5 system produces the industry’s lowest cost per repurposed deliverable.
iCR 2.5 monitors quality for baseband video as well as a wide range of files, including MPEG-2, DV, DVCPRO, QuickTime and WM9/VC-1. During ingest, iCR’s QC tools monitor problems with videotapes or the VTR itself, as well as sound levels, time code and compression performance. The workstation’s QC review tools allow the operator to review and annotate alarms in order to generate an error report.
Going beyond monitoring the technical characteristics of the video, the QC functionality in iCR 2.5 can also evaluate the quality and makeup of the video, audio and metadata content within the signal.
The company claims the upgraded system is so efficient that multiple, simultaneous transcode processes with auto QC start as soon as the master encode process is underway. As a result, users can complete all their mastering and repurposing tasks in about the same time it would take to perform a single encode/transcode operation using a conventional workflow.
For more information, visit www.snellwilcox.com.
