New Technology Company Creates Industry's First Toolset to Enable Greater Visibility, Quality, and Accuracy in Mastering and Archive Environments
DEL REY, Fla. -- June 4, 2013 -- Archimedia Technology, a new company whose technology and applications bridge the gap between content producers and their archives without loss of quality, today announced the appointment of its executive staff. Mark Gray will serve as CEO and president, Chi-Long Tsang will serve as chief technology officer (CTO), and Josef Marc will be the company's chief marketing officer. These Emmy(R) Award-winning industry veterans co-founded the company to ensure video engineers and archivists can access, play, manage, and test files in mastering formats including JPEG 2000, ultimately making content deliverable more quickly at higher quality.
"At NAB this year, we looked around and saw 4K cameras everywhere, but no way to deliver and read the files. There are no tools in the marketplace to satisfy both the people who create these high-end, pristine master files and the people who archive them, so we decided it was time someone solved that problem," Gray said. "We've all spent many years developing video archiving, digitization, and test technologies for some of the world's leading archive companies, broadcasters, and digital cinema studios. Now we've channeled that expertise into technology that allows both archivists and production teams to make use of their master files, which are, after all, the best copies available. Archimedia gives these users innovative tools that they've never had before but have long needed -- tools that streamline an incredibly complex process."
Archimedia caters to the needs of media archives and libraries; studios; broadcasters; production and postproduction facilities; and mastering, quality control, and digital cinema facilities, many of whom have volumes of pristine master files in their vaults. Master files are the ideal format for converting to other formats, but there are no universal players or management tools to support such large and cumbersome files, so most facilities simply store the masters and use other lossy formats when editing or converting files for delivery. Archimedia products will give users a way to work with, interchange, and deliver copies of master files directly from their originals while eliminating the need to store multiple formats.
As president and CEO, Gray will draw on his long and successful career in the broadcast, professional television, and rich media technology markets. He most recently served as executive vice president of Front Porch Digital after he engineered Front Porch Digital's acquisition of SAMMA(R) Systems. Gray had served as president, CEO, and co-founder of SAMMA Systems, and oversaw development of the Emmy Award-winning SAMMA migration process. Throughout his career, he has held several senior executive positions at global companies including Sony Corporation of America, Pinnacle Systems, and Chyron Corporation.
Tsang has worked in the broadcast and television industry for more than 20 years. At the forefront of design technology for some of the industry's leading products, Tsang won the U.K.'s Queen's Award for Innovation and Technology in 2007 and the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences' Emmy Award in 2012. Tsang previously served as CTO for SAMMA Systems and vice president of engineering for SAMMA products at Front Porch Digital. As the driving force behind SAMMA, he has become one of the leading proponents of the use of JPEG 2000 in the archive sector. Tsang's experience also includes a 13-year stint as chief software engineer at Snell & Wilcox (now Snell), where he created world-renowned products such as the TPG20, the world's first multiformat digital test-pattern generator.
Like Gray and Tsang, Marc also came from Front Porch Digital and SAMMA, where he managed customer engineers designing digital media archives, asset management, and mass digitization systems, as well as online and cloud video services. As vice president of solution architecture for Front Porch Digital, he designed digital video archive systems for the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Marc has held several other high-level positions throughout his career, and as a media consultant to Sony Corp., he co-wrote a book on interactive television and online media companies.
Archimedia will announce its first product in mid-June, giving users a long-needed common system for cost-effectively making use of their master files.
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About Archimedia
Archimedia Technology specializes in the processing, conversion, and playback of mastering formats, including JPEG 2000, for the professional broadcast, digital cinema, and video archival industries. Its technology and applications bridge the gap between content producers and their archives without loss of quality. Archimedia's products fulfill a critical piece of the production and archival workflows, encapsulating complex file interchange and quality control processes for mastering and archive formats into practical solutions that give end users a new level of access to their assets. More information is available at archimediatech.com.
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