Archimedia Technology, a new company whose technology and applications bridge the gap between content producers and their archives without loss of quality, has announced that Atlanta-based Crawford Media Services has purchased 10 licenses for the Archimedia Master Media Player.
The Archimedia Player is the first software player to support multiple vendors' formats, allowing users to view, test and measure archival-quality files on a standard HDTV. Crawford is using the Archimedia Player to test and verify the quality of the digital master files it creates for its video migration and digital archiving clients, all of whom hold large media collections.
Crawford Media Services’ clients range from the United Nations to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to WWE, and the file types, bit rates and other parameters they require are as varied as the clients themselves. The company creates a variety of different file types, so it must create and verify a new test file for every project before creating thousands of files of that same type. Until now, there has been no single reference player that could play high-bit-rate files, such as lossless JPEG 2000 or DPX sequences.
The Archimedia Master Media Player has features that enable Crawford to shorten the time between creating the "golden file" for a large digitization project and the time when production actually begins, which means that Crawford can complete jobs more quickly at lower cost, and ultimately get paid more quickly. Some of the most important features for Crawford are the player's ability to play computationally intense files, and to do so on standard equipment rather than purpose-built workstations, as well as the ability to use an HDMI output from something as basic as a laptop computer onto a typical HDMI LCD display.
Another especially important feature for Crawford is the Archimedia Player's metadata display, which reports information such as frame rate, pixel dimensions, wrapper and color subsampling to help ensure that the digitized file matches the client's parameters. The player reports back the metadata and can detect issues such as interlace problems.
An added benefit of having a software player that works with a generic computer is that there is no need to buy proprietary equipment. Rather, a single PC can play files one minute and be used for clipping or project management the next, giving Crawford even more benefit from its hardware investments.
With this purchase, Crawford has effectively established Archimedia Master Media Player as its central reference media player for quality control, editorial viewing and projection on emerging UHDTV/4K televisions.
More information is available at www.archimediatech.com.
