NAB attendees can find Dalet in the West Hall at booth W1717.

Driving Industry Conversations: Executive Briefings & Thought Leadership

Beyond the technology showcase that addresses enterprise workflows for News, Media, and Sport verticals, Dalet will drive urgent discussions around reshaping business models and the critical need for Time-to-Value solutions at key events like the Devoncroft Summit and the annual Dalet Executive Breakfast.

Devoncroft NAB 2025 Summit – Dalet on CEO Panel

Dalet CEO Santiago Solanas will join industry leaders on stage at the Devoncroft “State of the Industry” Summit on Saturday, April 5, 2025, to explore the path forward for media organizations. For more information, click here.

Rebasing the Industry – Dalet Executive Briefing

The annual Dalet Executive Breakfast will take place on Monday, April 7, 2025, at the Wynn Hotel. Featuring guest speaker Josh Stinehour from Devoncroft, the session will offer fresh insights into modernizing industry practices for long-term success. Register your interest in attending here.

Customer-First Innovation: The Dalet NAB 2025 Solutions Showcase

NAB attendees are invited to book a meeting with Dalet leadership, account managers and customer success to discuss how Dalet’s fundamental shift in deployment methodologies and enhanced underlying technologies significantly enhance the customer and user experience and business outcomes from first engagement to onboarding, proactive support and beyond.

Key Innovations in the Dalet Solutions Showcase:

• Optimized Media Production and Supply Chain: Media workflow solutions today need to generate revenue or save money, and they need to do it quickly. The latest developments of packaged workflows for Dalet Flex are focused on providing a fully customizable solution designed to meet the high demand of top-tier organizations from day one. New AI integrations with DeepVA, semantic search, and a full migration to Kubernetes promise a better user experience with even more elastic, resilient performance on premise, hybrid or in the cloud.

• Next-Generation Story-Centric News Operation: Dalet story-centric news operation means content is no longer locked to a specific distribution channel. It can be easily accessed and packaged for digital and linear via a web browser or the new Dalet Pyramid Mobile App. Integrated tools for news story planning, editing, rundown management, and distribution streamline the entire operation. Dalet Pyramid Rundown, the latest release from the Pyramid family, enables news operations to access planning from the rundown and access the rundown from planning.

Enhancing Operational Efficiency: Key Updates

• Browser-based Audio Editing: One size does not fit all, especially when seeking operation efficiency. This is why the latest updates to Dalet Cut brings a new dedicated user experience for audio-only editing. Whether it’s for radio, podcast, or any other audio format, editors have the accessibility and intuitive experience of a browser-based editor, tailored for their specific needs.

• Scalable Ingest Management: Live ingest today is more variable than ever in volume, format, and workflows. Dalet Brio and Dalet InStream continue to expand functionality and support for additional formats and workflows to provide a cost-effective and innovative ingest solution for your operation. Managing this increased variability in a centralized manner is crucial to an efficient operation. Dalet will be previewing its latest web-based ingest manager, Dalet Ingest Portal, which will provide modern, intuitive scheduling for Dalet products as well as 3rd party solutions.

• Advanced Media Processing & Transcoding: With the increase of both sources and destinations for your content comes more formats, codecs and standards that you need to convert to. Transcoding today needs to not only be done at the highest quality but also efficiently. Dalet AmberFin’s latest updates bring both technology and pricing model updates with best-in-market pay-per-use pricing that can be combined with your other Dalet solutions or utilized as standalone. Recent updates bring new HDR10+ support as well new codecs such as HTJ2K, all of which is available on-premise, in the cloud, or hybrid to best match your operational needs.

Dalet NAB Networking & Engagement Opportunities

Join Us for NAB Afterworks Happy Hour

Network with industry peers at Dalet’s NAB Afterworks Happy Hour, hosted at booth W1717 on April 6th, 7th, and 8th from 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM.

Book a Meeting with Dalet

Schedule a meeting to discuss industry-leading solutions and learn more about Dalet’s commitment to media innovation and advocacy.

The post Dalet welcomes you to NAB Show 2025 appeared first on Dalet.

Dalet AmberFin is a leading transcoding and media processing solution that delivers trusted media conversions wherever you need it. It has earned recognition for meeting the highest quality standards across the entire media supply chain, to deliver the best possible viewer experience – all while abiding by rigorous certifications. The latest updates to Dalet AmberFin continue to build on this reputation by bringing new codec support and elastic workflows to the platform.

With new camera models, codecs, and standards surfacing daily, Dalet AmberFin supports a wide array of the most common advanced formats and standards, from capture to distribution. Whether high-end RAW camera formats, such as RED Raw or Adobe DNG, advanced delivery workflows like Dolby Vision HDR or standards’ conversions, Dalet AmberFin has got you covered. The latest release has expanded codec support to include ProRes Raw, Nikon NEF, and more. Be sure to check the latest datasheet for a comprehensive list of supported codecs and standards.

Premium Quality

Our ongoing commitment to adding capabilities to Dalet AmberFin is not just about supporting new codecs – but about processing and delivering those codecs at the highest possible quality. With the current media landscape being intensely competitive, giving your content a superior edge will give you a headstart. Whether it’s frame-rate conversions, color space conversion, or HDR tone mapping, Dalet AmberFin delivers superior quality results, certified by industry leaders such as Apple and Dolby. This is made possible through Dalet AmberFin’s proprietary transcode engine, designed and optimized to serve high-end media and entertainment companies.

Elasticity and Deployment Flexibility

While quality is paramount, it must be paired with efficiency to stay competitive. Dalet AmberFin accomplishes this with a flexible architecture that allows for on-premises, cloud, or hybrid deployments. Dalet AmberFin Cloud introduces a new level of agility with elastic processing, enabling limitless scalability. Whether you already have AmberFin nodes or existing on-premises hardware, you can augment it with additional elastic cloud expansion that maximizes efficiency. ​​​​​​By leveraging the cloud’s power, you can adjust your processing power with a flexible pay-per-hour model, minimizing your on-premises resources and upfront investment.​​​ Depending on your use case, you can see a savings of up to 50% with cloud deployments over fixed on-prem nodes. ​ Dalet AmberFin Cloud utilizes the same proprietary transcoding engine regardless of your deployment, offering you the best of both worlds – elastic processing and top-tier quality results.

State-of-the-Art Automation

​​A powerful workflow engine is the final crucial component of a successful media processing solution – to maximize speed, quality, and elasticity automation is critical. Dalet AmberFin houses a robust workflow engine with a graphical workflow designer for you to create and manage your processes. It also provides a complete set of APIs for integration with your existing workflows. Built on the same unified platform as the rest of the Dalet ecosystem, Dalet AmberFin enables even more streamlined and optimized integrations with Dalet Flex, Dalet Pyramid, and Dalet Galaxy five. This empowers you to take your media processing workflows to new heights.​​​​​

Leading media companies such as ​BBC, DAZN, NBC Universal, and Paramount Pictures have trusted Dalet AmberFin to handle their standards’ conversions, archive packaging and color conversions for over a decade.

Available on a subscription basis, Dalet AmberFin comes with various hosting and operation models including SaaS. On-premises, hybrid or in the cloud, in your environment or as a service, we offer flexible deployment options to meet your business constraints and ease technical transitions. Visit our product page to learn more or reach out for a demo today.

The post Leveraging Premium Media Processing for Business Success  appeared first on Dalet.

Lights out.

Now joining the roar of engines is a particular scent. You might think it’s “burning rubber” but to the spectators in the grandstands wearing the papaya of McLaren, the emerald of Aston Martin, or the tri-color combination of Alfa-Romeo, this is the cologne of competition. This is the thrill of the Grand Prix. This is Formula One. This is also MotoGP, NASCAR, and the Baja 1000. This is the essence of motorsports, and fans everywhere are celebrating the new season starting this month. That celebration is just a part of the raw desire fans of motorsports have for content. From the new season of Drive to Survive to updates from Twitter and Instagram, fans are hungry for the latest news, clips, and race updates.

But before you jump free from the opening crush with a media production schedule that will deliver to the fans what they want, you should first get your video engagement strategy together.

The Starting Grid: Building a Video Engagement Strategy for Your Franchise

When building your content strategy, the best starting position is not necessarily pole. Pole position, in this case, would be the launching point — you’ve got your goals and targets lined up and you are ready to take the lead; but in this analogy, the drivers in the back of the grid can be looked at as the strategy’s foundation. What stories do you have to tell? What broadcasting and social platforms do you want to occupy? And finally, what are the tools you need to bring this strategy to fruition?

Let’s take a closer look at that grid, waiting to start. What are the stories you want to tell in motorsports?

• The race. When it comes to the race itself, the story is omnipresent within the intensity of the start, the battles far from the lead where drivers battle for points, the fastest laps, and the most overtakes.

• The franchise. In the words of Lawrence Stroll, one of Team Aston Martin’s principal sponsors, “It’s the car of James Bond. Of course, they need to be in Formula One.” Every one of these franchises, from McLaren to Mercedes to Hass, has stories; and these are stories that are waiting to be told.

• Off-the-Track Tensions. To say there is a lot of drama in motorsports would be an understatement. Racing features competitors becoming teammates, and rivalries between drivers coming to the surface well after the race is done. When Dale Earnhardt ruled the NASCAR circuit, his nickname of “The Intimidator” didn’t just apply to his racing tactics. Soap Operas don’t have a thing against the behind-the-scenes stories of motorsports.

From the Grandstands to the Couch: Where Are Your Fans?

Once the race is underway, drivers focus on reaching the finish line, ahead of them miles on miles of movement, pit stops aside. The same can be said for the fans of motorsports. Consumption of media happens anywhere and everywhere now, and just as drivers like Sebastian Vettel, Kyle Larson, and Rahel Frey are off the line and on the go, so are the fans. With so many consumption platforms, though, where do you begin to lay down the groundwork?

Begin with the basics: Video. When cars are revealed and analysts come in to break down the race, YouTube tends to be a popular video engagement platform for motorsports. Here, production facilities can easily shoot, edit, and release breakdown videos. From these videos, clips can be repurposed for other popular platforms like Instagram and TikTok, bringing the best of the race to mobile devices around the world. Branching out from the basics, you can look at other platforms — including a franchise’s website or the motorsport’s website — that feature native formats exclusive to these other platforms.

Final Lap: Gathering the Tools for Your Video Engagement Strategy

Your stories are ready to be told. Your distribution platforms are targeted. Your strategy is taking shape.

Now, you need to make it all work.

Like a solid gearbox, good brakes, and tires ready to take on the track in its current conditions, you also need the right tools to create and deliver your videos whenever and wherever the story emerges. This is where and when Dalet offers you award-winning platforms that allow you to get your video engagement strategy underway.

When it comes to organizing all these assets — footage of drivers, of races, and hours behind-the-scenes and between-the-races — Dalet Flex can leverage AI solutions to index, catalog and manage your assets, archiving clips for later projects while organizing other assets for present projects, and prepare your content for a variety of social and digital platforms. Speaking of those numerous viewing platforms, what will you need to prep those clips, recaps, and moments from the Pit Crew for all these output options? Coming out of the chicane and passing on the inside is Dalet AmberFin, granting you the ability to transcode your media to numerous formats and codecs for best results on both mainstream media and mobile outlets. These solutions are ready to take your strategy to a higher level of efficiency.

But is there an up and coming driver to watch?

Around the turn comes Dalet Pyramid, our latest offering for news planning, production, and distribution optimized for on-location and mobile storytelling. This next-gen, storytelling-centric newsroom solution is ready to take your strategy to the cloud, giving you the ability to keep your motorsport community always informed and constantly connected through your media productions.

And That’s a Checkered Flag

Presently, other motorsports are looking for their own Drive to Survive sensation; but even without a popular Netflix series promoting their particular brand of automotive prowess, motorsports remain a popular pastime, its history reaching back to the end of the nineteenth century. Technology now grants everyone involved, from the sports organization themselves down to the individual drivers, to build or even rebuild their brand, create communities, and make connections through audio and video.

Dalet can help you nurture these communities, build these connections, with the content product, management and distribution solutions we have created so you can achieve your video engagement goals. Our solutions make it easier for you to create compelling content, reach audiences everywhere, and be ready to scale when the time comes.

The post Drive to Thrive: The Growing Market of Motorsports Video Engagement appeared first on Dalet.

Contents

Chapter 1: The State of Video Transcoding
Chapter 2: The Raging Storm of Content
Chapter 3: A New Video Transcoding Strategy
Chapter 4: Why Video Transcoding is Essential for Successful Streaming
Chapter 5: Mastering Video Transcoding with Dalet AmberFin
Chapter 6: Taking the Next Steps Forward

From the Beginning: The State of Video Transcoding

Look back a decade and consider how far streaming has come as a technology, as a platform, and as a delivery method. 2011 does not seem that long ago, but streaming media was on the verge of completely disrupting the media industry. Today, there are consumers that only know streaming as their primary method of media delivery. While streaming media has completely changed how audiences consume media, the technology has created a new wave of challenges for content creators now looking to feature their productions across a variety of platforms from as expansive as a movie screen to as intimate as a smartphone. One of these challenges is transcoding. Now, instead of having a destination in mind and knowing which workflow to apply, content is being released across multiple platforms, each platform asking for its own set of parameters.

How do we navigate this brave new world?

To understand the challenges and demands of video transcoding, it is a good idea to understand the process from its most basic application. Raw digital video takes up a good amount of data which is why devices tend to compress the audio and video data into a format easy for storage purposes. Many of these formats you might recognize at a glance: M4V, MOV, or MP4. Video transcoding takes compressed video, restores it to a full, raw format, and then compresses it again into a format specific to a platform. At the beginning of this process, you would have video from a live broadcast in its most raw form. The data size of these files will appear somewhat daunting.

A video transcoder will take these gigantic files and compress them from their original format into smaller files that are more optimized for an editing suite like Adobe Premiere Pro®, or perhaps into a format optimized for streaming services. Video transcoding, now with the demand of the earlier-mentioned streaming services, is key in delivering content across numerous platforms, reaching the largest audience available.

The Raging Storm of Content

Presently, media production houses and studios are in the middle of a streaming and cloud technology revolution. Consumers are enjoying the luxury of consuming media from any location on a device of their choice. In Attest’s recent US Media Consumption Report 2021 study, several telling statistics showcased how streaming media has completely upended the industry.

• For the first time in the study’s history, more people were consuming media via streaming platforms (83%) than audiences watching live television (81%).
• Netflix continues to dominate the streaming video scene with 69.4 percent of those surveyed having an active subscription. 52 percent have Amazon Prime Video, which comes included with the Amazon Prime subscription, and nearly 37 percent now have Disney Plus. HBO Max, which the Attest survey categorized as “video on demand” as opposed to streaming, clocked in at 31.4 percent. Households with at least one child under the age of 18 in the house have higher rates of streaming subscriptions across the board.
• Podcasting is still enjoying a sharp upward trend, 56% of respondents listening and subscribing to podcasts. This is up from the 2020 study which reported 49% of respondents listening to podcasts.

With 83% of media being consumed via streaming to different devices, cloud services have also grown in their demand and application within the industry. There is also a very high demand to take existing workflows and upgrade them to cloud-based, elastic operations.

A New Video Transcoding Strategy: Applying a New Workflow to the Old

With so many changes in the industry, the process of post-production is in flux. No longer are we seeing “one size fits all” workflows, but each individual production offering their own unique needs. Instead of post-production workflows being pre-determined and tailored for one final destination, now there are multiple destinations for one project. Productions are expected to appear in a wide variety of formats, and therefore video transcoding is so important in this age of streaming media. With today’s standards continuing to be refined for existing platforms and redefined for new and emerging platforms, the video transcoding process requires something new.

As defined earlier, video transcoding takes media files (either video or audio), restores the media to its native, uncompressed format, and then re-encodes the content into a target format. A common video conversion process starts with an MOV file that is transcoded to an MP4 file using the H.264 codec. A reliable strategy to video transcoding will do everything to preserve the picture more effectively with better compression.

Depending on the strategy you decide to implement, whether you are using a computer running an open-source, command-line interface or a SaaS editing suite offering a more robust UI, video transcoding needs a computer with plenty of processing speed as this process is considered “computationally intensive” by media professionals. In short, video transcoding benefits from substantial hardware and system resources, like generous amounts of system RAM, graphics acceleration, and higher-end CPUs; but video transcoding can still tie up powerful desktop machines, sometimes for hours at a time depending on the running time of projects.

This is why it’s unlikely to easily transcode 4K video to a quality HLS or DASH stream with a Chromebook.

Why Video Transcoding is Essential for Successful Streaming

Video transcoding is a key in making adaptive streaming successful for a project. This workflow is a step in preparing your content for a delivery protocol that can reach the widest possible number of display devices. In order to assure the best quality viewing experience for the project you’re working on, adaptive streaming is the preferred approach. Video transcoding is the essential step in moving your best content from the capture device to a high-quality streaming output such as HLS or DASH. These adaptive streaming formats are the best for reducing buffering and playback issues, delivering the sharpest possible picture continuously and with no interruptions.

Video transcoding in a streaming workflow takes a video asset from a capture device, and the incoming video and audio data encoded in a file or streaming format by the camera and then sent off to some sort of media processing software like Dalet AmberFin. The encoder will make sure whatever original data will be recompressed into a format suitable for internet streaming. Modern video encoders should also offer to create multiple stream renditions that transrate and transsize to different bitrates and resolutions. The final files are then sent to a media server to be packaged into an adaptive streaming format (like HLS) and served via HTTP over the “last mile” to viewers. As described, this will create multiple options for content delivery, from HD output on a smart TV or desktop to a suitable size for a tablet or smartphone screen.

Media and how it is being distributed continues to change and evolve, with new devices, applications, and input sources being introduced regularly. While new cameras like 4K POV cameras and even on-board smartphone cameras, new data feeds, and innovations in streaming improve the quality and variety of content being produced, they also inevitably create new challenges in content delivery.

Mastering Video Transcoding with Dalet AmberFin

With the global disruption of streaming services across the media industry, the ability to produce many content packages for a variety of platforms is essential. The sound strategy is one workflow yielding multiple files all optimized for a variety of delivery platforms from IMAX to smartphones. At Dalet, we offer Dalet AmberFin, a transcoder and workflow engine ready to meet these new demands for media conversions, available on-premises, in a Dalet-managed SaaS environment, or inside a personal, secure VPC.

Dalet AmberFin has been trusted by major media organizations to handle standards conversions for over a decade. As 4K resolution, HDR, and immersive audio are expected in modern media productions, regardless of the presentation platform, Dalet AmberFin offers video transcoding for all types of viewing screens while assuring the original image quality is preserved for audiences to experience as intended.

Whether it is a multi-tenant SaaS or single-tenant customer-managed VPC cloud environment, the Dalet AmberFin workflow engine offers complete control of on account of its API, a real benefit when Dalet focused creative options and solutions for cloud-based production studios. It is this forward-thinking strategy that allows Dalet AmberFin to quickly adapt to new and existing video transcoding workflows easily and efficiently.

Taking the Next Steps Forward: What’s Your Video Transcoding Strategy for Tomorrow?

While the need for a video transcoding strategy is abundantly clear, something else that remains clear is the disruption sparking the demand for this strategy is far from over. Now, media productions look to the next frontiers of engagement and interaction, inspired by the live streaming events that initiated the disruption to begin with. Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality are only the beginning, and are two new delivery methods that, while hardly new, are now becoming more and more accessible to the public.

When searching for your own next step forward in keeping your video transcoding workflows updated, efficient, and effective, consider Dalet AmberFin as the reliable solution to a uniquely powerful transcoding and media orchestration platform, perfect for ensuring that the right content is available at the highest quality, properly wrapped, and all as part of an automated and dependable process.

As the market and the media landscape continues to evolve after an incredible disruption, remote teams are now launching video transcoding strategies with implementation of Dalet AmberFin. Working with other solutions, such as the powerful, cloud-based media logistics, asset management and content production solution, Dalet Flex, content providers are achieving success with their media projects. The change, however, is far from done; and with so many options to consume media, it could appear daunting. It comes down to the video transcoding strategy in place, and how ready productions are for the new and incredible technologies coming that make their audiences part of the production itself.

The post Cracking the Code: Mastering Video Transcoding appeared first on Dalet.

Chapter 1: Evolution of Post-Production Workflows
Chapter 2: Mandating a New Post-Production Workflow Architecture
Chapter 3: How One Post House Scaled Operations to Capture New Business
Chapter 4: What It Takes to Evolve Your Post-Production Workflow
Chapter 5: Evolve or Perish: The Future of Post-Production Workflow

Evolution of Post-Production Workflows

The past two years have witnessed some incredible disruptions in the media industry. What was once considered “exciting new ground” for the future became something of an upheaval of broadcasting’s status quo. Nothing calls more urgently for change than the need to accommodate the realities of a decentralized work environment. Surging volumes of work orders, shorter turnarounds, new distribution outlets seeming to appear online in the blink of an eye, and both open source and proprietary formats have combined at an accelerating pace to outdate current, trusted post-production workflows.

Media producers are re-evaluating their post-production workflow for efficiency and productivity in order to remain relevant in this new market of video-on-demand. Many of these new workflows are built from the ground up to accommodate the complexities of content, optimized for a vast spectrum of platforms ranging from traditional television markets to streaming services, those services targeting a vast spectrum of devices ranging from smartphones to high-end home theater displays.

With content creators looking to new post-production workflows, the need for cloud-based solutions became evident. Working in the cloud affords great flexibility in workflow configurations.

Striving to Be Better: Mandating a New Post-Production Workflow Architecture

The reasons remote post-production capabilities are so vital to success are well documented. Several significant drivers, starting with the trend in remote workforce collaboration, are behind this need to change the standard workflows in the market.

1) The rise of remote work in post-production workflows calls for a cloud-based environment.

Hybrid combinations of centralized and remote contributions to post-production workflows are here to stay. Researcher FutureSource Consulting stressed the point in a recent report on trends in post-production: “As in many other industries, the seismic shift to remote operation at scale seen in the past year has caused a cultural shift in mindset to the reliability and openness of remote working. Many mission-critical applications must still remain on premise, but we expect to see technology providers continue to place strategic emphasis on developing their products to facilitate and support even more ambitious remote production workflows in the future.”

Producers need to engage their post-production staff with confidence whether they’re working in the same town or a continent apart. Their collective output will be on par with traditional single-location operations. A cloud-based platform can cover every aspect of the post-production process to ensure content is packaged in every required format with all relevant assets, metadata, language-accurate closed captions, and any remaining essential elements required for every type of distribution.

2) Distribution requirements are constantly in flux, driven by the unrelenting increase in Over-the-Top (OTT) video services.

Streamed video services, now topping 80% of households in at least five countries, including the U.K., Canada, the U.S., Sweden and Denmark, averages close to 29% of worldwide audiences. Considering the popularity of these services, OTT platforms such as Disney+, Apple TV+, and Netflix are on a projected course to hit 35% of media viewership by 2025. In the U.S., OTT penetration stands at 82% compared to 58% for legacy pay TV with the number of services, often including pay TV, averaging close to four per household.

Insatiable consumer appetites for more choices ensure there will be ever more OTT services for producers to target as distribution outlets. By one count, at least 11 OTT services worldwide have more than 30 million subscribers. And there are hundreds of new OTT services reaching niche audiences, which, on a global scale, are often too big to be ignored.

3) There is more original content entering post-production than ever before.

OTT providers became the driving force behind this surge of original movies, series, and documentaries, following Netflix’s success at employing original content as a major audience draw. By 2019 Netflix accounted for nearly a third of 1,178 U.S.-produced dramatic series, documentaries, and other original projects. Amazon Prime quickly followed suit, although at 314 hours of first-run content running worldwide in 2019 its output was dwarfed by the 2,500 hours produced by Netflix. This competitive impact triggered bigger commitments from other networks and studios as well, many of whom now depend on self-branded OTT.

4) The demand for live-streamed content is creating new opportunities for post-production workflows suited to providing cloud-based support for editing, transcoding, packaging, and quality control.

With online viewing of content taking hold, live-streamed video traffic is projected to exceed on-demand video traffic by 2023. Adding momentum to the phenomenon is the use of the internet to live-stream content that can’t be found on traditional broadcast TV.

Sport is the biggest contributor to this evolution. Much of the testing of post-production workflows applied to streaming content comes from the sports industry. Streaming the latest tries of a rugby final, the moment of “Lights Out” at the Turkish Grand Prix, or the grand slam hallmarking a World Series is simply a matter of augmenting packaging processes to reach new affiliates who win rights to existing broadcast productions. This has created a demand for low-cost, professional-caliber remote production capabilities.

Photo credit: NRL Pictures

More significantly, esports have moved well beyond niche status to reach a global fan base topping 800 million on its way to a billion by 2024. Game publishers, who began staging big esports events as a way to boost the popularity of their core products, are now capitalizing on esports streaming as a business in its own right, by staging more events for online distribution and augmenting productions with social networking, viewer-selected camera views and other features.

5) The variety of devices and platforms used for content consumption is adding ever more complexity to post-production workflows.

The way people are watching content now extends across smartphones, tablets, PCs, TVs. TV media players, game consoles and even internet-connected virtual reality (VR) head-mounted devices (HMDs). When streaming is in play, content must be transcoded and packaged into multiple adaptive bitrate (ABR) profiles for each type of device, and each platform — be it Twitter, Twitch, or TikTok — has specific needs for their own post-production. From presentation to codecs, preparing media for content distribution and consumption has become something of a challenge.

Increased consumption of streamed content on connected TVs has fueled a surge in 4K UHD and HDR formatting among OTT providers, which has created competitive pressure on cable and broadcast outlets to follow suit. Nearly all original content produced by Netflix and Amazon is now offered in UHD, much of it enhanced with HDR. As of mid-2018, Netflix said 30% of its subscribers worldwide had opted for its higher priced 4K/HDR service tier. Other global OTT providers of 4K and HDR-enhanced 4K content include Disney+, Hulu, Apple TV+, FandangoNOW, and YouTube.

Taking the First Step: How One Post House Scaled Operations to Capture New Business

Breaking away from the familiar is always challenging. Is the risk worth the reward? Changing post-production workflows you are familiar with, from media giants to independent post houses, can test the logistical limits of your projects. However, solutions do exist that can smooth the transition to cloud-based workflows. The crucial role Dalet plays in helping customers thrive in this new environment is illustrated by the London-based post-production company Smoke and Mirrors (S&M), now Tag Collective.

Tag Collective needed to find a cost-effective way to scale operations to better pursue business opportunities. This had to be done in the context of addressing ever more complex business rules for content quality control, effective transcoding and distribution while reducing administrative overhead, retiring aging legacy systems, and removing the bottlenecks imposed by tape-based operations. Implementation of an automated, intelligent task management was made possible thanks to Dalet Flex’s configurable post-production workflows. Data-driven workflows tied to over 100 scripted actions curtailed human error and duplication with a far more agile approach to executing changes, resulting in an average 85% reduction in project completion times.

What It Takes to Evolve Your Post-Production Workflow

This is but one example of how the new post-production workflow feels native with the Dalet Flex platform and integrated tools. Dalet Flex also offers freedom to create content supply chains perfectly matched to a studio’s or production house’s needs. Such adaptability is vital to updating post-production workflows, as seen in Dalet Flex and in the high-performance transcoding flexibility of Dalet AmberFin, a highly scalable, media processing platform for video/image, audio, and subtitle/caption processing. Eliminating the need to create multiple versions of content allows significant reductions in storage space and optimized management for multiple distribution outlets. This scalability is essential in meeting the tight time-to-market deadlines imposed with all types of video content entering post-production workflows, including non-linear as well as live programming.

Evolve or Perish: The Future of Post-Production Workflow

When searching for your own next step forward in updating your post-production workflow, Dalet Flex supports the automation and orchestration essential for successful post-production operations designed for the premium video marketplace. Dalet Flex can run on commodity appliances across any combination of private and public clouds to support workflows involving any combination of remote and centralized inputs. There’s no better way to accommodate today’s market and its remote team working behind-the-scenes in content delivery than with implementation of Dalet Flex, together with Dalet AmberFin. Success can be achieved for your media productions at minimal initial and ongoing operational costs compared to any other approach, ensuring customers will be able to reap the benefits for years to come.

The post Putting More Flow Into Your Post-Production Workflow appeared first on Dalet.

Nonetheless, having already discussed with industry peers and read-up on multiple reports, my 2021 media technology trends predictions are not around the latest ground-breaking, brand-spanking new technologies announced at this year’s virtual of CES (there weren’t that many, either), but rather around perfecting specific business practices that became essential to survive 2020. As esteemed Mark Harrison, CEO of the the DPP, recently stated “The biggest mistake in predicting trends is to assume that the latest thing is going to be the next thing”, so true in 2021.

So, for what is worth, here are the top four media technology trends that I think will be essential in 2021:

You will experience security breaches

In a time where the bulk of the workforce is home-based, the ability to protect networks, content, communications and workflows is paramount. Most companies in the broadcast sector have reacted by reinforcing barriers: more firewalls, solid VPNs, multiple levels of authentication…. But no matter how much you bootstrap your networks, the stark reality is that there will be hacks and security breaches. It’s a matter of when and not if… Hence, as well as protecting the fort, what technology vendors and buyers alike need do more of is implement better monitoring, detect anomalies quickly, and have contingency plans in place so security breaches can be resolved quickly and efficiently. Broadcast systems are increasingly looking like IT systems, so upskilling personnel is essential too. We take security very seriously at Dalet, and our chief information security officer (CISO) makes sure that all potential threats are caught early and that staff is properly trained and informed.

Cloud will not be the answer to everything!

Conversations in this industry are becoming increasingly “cloudy”… And in a post-COVID world, there is a tendency to assume that the cloud is here to fix it all: remote access – check, lower cost of ownership – check, elasticity – check… It would be nice if it made coffee too (and living with an engineer, I’m pretty sure that can be easily done!)

But let’s face it, reality is very different which becomes apparent when looking at the 2021 media technology trends. For most broadcasters, amortizing their existing capital investment is still important, and the cost of egress for large amounts of media remains prohibitive when you have years of valuable content (did I mention security yet?). So indeed the adoption of cloud infrastructure across the media supply chain is increasing quickly, but it’s certainly not going to be the immediate replacement for all production and distribution workflows today, tomorrow, this year. The capabilities of cloud infrastructure, compute elasticity and agile deployment are an additional tool that should be in any content creator and distributor’s toolbox. Hybrid deployments will be here for years to come.

Only the fit will survive

Our COO, Stéphane Schlayen, likes to add inspiring quotes to his strategic presentations. One of my all-time favorites is Darwin’s “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” Never in the history of the media and entertainment industry has business agility been more important. As our colleagues at Devoncroft stated during their virtual Executive Summit in December, the pandemic has revealed that operational inefficiencies can no longer be financially sustained.

As a result, we are seeing an increase in the number of mergers and acquisitions, such as the (for now, pending) sale by Technicolor of its post-production assets to Streamland Media, and the most recent acquisition of SDI Media by Iyuno, both no doubt driven by the need to streamline businesses and reach critical mass. I expect we’ll see plenty of M&A activity that will redefine future media technology trends, both on the buyer and vendor side of the industry, in many cases to pick up the pieces left by a COVID-driven struggle.

Customer experience will drive success

As our industry gallops towards more subscription-based and SaaS-driven solutions, I firmly believe that providing a long-lasting, positive customer experience, at every touch point between vendors and buyers and between content providers and consumers will be key to success. For technology providers this means delivering outcomes, not products – which is why Dalet is focusing on creating solutions that provide agility, mobility and flexibility to our users. To keep up with media technology trends in 2021, we plan to include offerings that help our users create content from anywhere with Dalet Pyramid, with hosted infrastructure and remote management services with Dalet Flex and Dalet AmberFin, and 360 customer services at hand to support our clients wherever they want to take their business.

It’s the end of ownership and the rise of usership – time to delight (y)our customers.

What do you predict?

In my view, these are four important themes that will color 2021 for the media technology industry. Companies that get these right will stand in a better place for success in a year where unpredictability will be the new normal.

What do you believe are the top media technology trends in 2021? Leave me a comment below and let’s get this conversation started!

The post 2021 Media Technology Trends appeared first on Dalet.

For 30 years, we’ve enabled hundreds of media-rich organizations to transform their production and distribution workflows – accelerating media operations, maximizing collaboration and creating higher value from content.

I’d like to take a moment to reflect on our story, and share with you our exciting plans for the next chapter.

Our roots, our strength.

Founded in 1990, Dalet focused its efforts on audio and developed the radio industry’s first automation software. This innovation brought radio stations into the digital era. In 2000, we made a strategic pivot and entered the video market. By 2002, Dalet had developed and launched the first end-to-end news production system powered by a media asset management (MAM) platform. The innovative, new workflow solution was adopted by technology-progressive broadcasters such as NBC (US), BFM (France) and Prime TV (Australia).

By 2010, MAM-powered solutions were considered an essential component of enterprise media workflows. With a decade of experience, Dalet would continue to lead the MAM market, innovating in the areas of business intelligence, cloud, and AI enablement, and expand the adoption of MAM beyond News, Radio and Programs, into Sports, Post-Production and Archive.

In 2019, Dalet purchased the Ooyala Flex Media Platform business. With this strategic acquisition, we now have an agile multi-platform content distribution solution that covers the entire content supply chain. The expanded product portfolio enables customers across a wider range of markets – sports teams, leagues and federations, brands and corporate organizations, as well as media and entertainment companies – to scale up their digital offerings and better engage their audiences.

This move also accelerated Dalet’s transformation into a leading SaaS and cloud-based solutions provider.

It is humbling to think that today, more than 80,000 users benefit from using Dalet solutions worldwide in their day-to-day work. There are many to acknowledge for this milestone. I extend my gratitude to the dedicated Dalet team members who have worked diligently to bring our solutions to market and to the hundreds of customers, some who have been with Dalet as long as twenty-five years. To those customers who were there from the beginning, a special thank you. It’s been a tremendous partnership and we look forward to the next steps.

Introducing our new brand

Our world has changed. We have evolved. It is time for the new.

One year ago, we started a company-wide initiative to reassess our brand, starting with our values and looking into our voice, our products and our processes. The goal of this collaborative initiative was to accelerate our company transformation and write the next chapter of our story, together with our customers and all “Daletians.”

Our new look, starting with the new Dalet logo, reflects our ability to evolve with the times, to flex and adapt, always looking forward. Our new identity represents the agility of our people and the innovative solutions we continue to bring to market.

Our new website offers a streamlined user experience and modern look and feel. It is the hub where media professionals can learn more about Dalet, interact with the team, and explore how our solutions can help them craft compelling stories, develop meaningful connections, and increase authentic engagement.

Our new identity and values – trusted conversations, confident simplicity, and human connections – are intertwined and embody what Dalet stands for.

You can learn more about our transformation on this video.

A new era…

At Dalet, we work with passion and purpose to make our customers’ lives easier. With this at the core of our mission, I am pleased to present our streamlined product lineup designed to provide customers the mobility, agility and flexibility they need to ride the ebb and flow of global changes and, embrace new business opportunities.

The Introduction of Dalet Pyramid

Introduced today and representing two decades of Dalet innovation in news, Dalet Pyramid is the pinnacle of mobility, agility and flexibility for content production, offering collaborative, digital-first workflows that reimagine storytelling to deliver content anywhere, anytime, any screen. Discover Dalet Pyramid.

Ooyala Flex Media Platform Evolves into Dalet Flex

Starting today, our Ooyala Flex Media Platform will be known as Dalet Flex. Dalet Flex is the ultimate content supply chain solution for multi-platform, OTT and digital distribution. Thousands of content creators and distributors rely on Dalet Flex to efficiently produce and publish, increasing revenue opportunities and delighting audiences. Discover Dalet Flex.

Dalet Galaxy five and Dalet AmberFin

Dalet Galaxy five is our leading solution for enterprise media management operations, powering some of the biggest broadcasters in the world. Dalet AmberFin is the de facto standard transcoding solution for preserving image quality, with premium media processing and supply chain capabilities. Discover Dalet Galaxy five and Dalet AmberFin.

Complementing these products, Dalet offers a range of tools to enhance operations, content and audience experience. These include live ingest and playout with Dalet Brio, broadcast-grade graphics with Dalet Cube^NG, studio automation with Dalet OnePlay, fast-paced multimedia editing with Dalet OneCut, AI enablement with Dalet Media Cortex, and content monetization with Dalet StoreFront, as well as Dalet APIs to build and customize your bespoke media operation with our partner ecosystem.

World Class Customer Care

Dalet Care assists customers every step of their digital media transformation journey, from consulting to system design, project management, 360 support, training and coaching. Our core objective is your success, now and in the future.

We look forward to writing this next chapter with you and continuing to transform the creative and media industries with the same passion and determination that began this incredible journey a little more than 30 years ago.

The post Your stories, infinite possibilities. appeared first on Dalet.

Dalet AmberFin has been a go-to media conversion platform for high-end content for years now. Its scalable media processing tools offer transcode, color conversion, packaging, and file transport with an emphasis on the quality of the output. The AmberFin transcode engine was initially designed to run on cost-effective, commodity IT hardware on-premises, but on September 1, 2020 that all changed with the launch of Dalet AmberFin Cloud Transcoder.

The same great picture quality… with unlimited processing power and scalability!

The new AmberFin Cloud Transcoder service is accessed through the same workflow engine as the on-premises transcoder, with the added advantage of immediate access to extra processing power in the cloud any time it’s needed. This gives facilities the ability to control an on-premises, fixed-capacity deployment and a burst-capacity deployment from the same workflow engine and REST API.  

We know our customers come to rely on AmberFin because of the quality and complexity of their requirements. Simpler transcode services can’t handle problems like having to do a standard conversion, in addition to a mezzanine conversion and putting a file package together at the end. AmberFin excels at that sort of complexity. So every feature that our customers know, like and love from the on-premises AmberFin solution, also works in the cloud.

Nothing changes. Everything changes!

There is no need to port any existing conversion profiles or workflows to get the cloud service running. AmberFin customers can use the new cloud service by logging in with a simple set of credentials and gain immediate access to extra burst capacity at comparable speeds. 

The service is offered as a low-cost multi-tenant environment offering geographical flexibility, with the transcode container being cloned into the bucket closest to the request. Customers can also deploy the AmberFin container inside their own VPC (virtual private cloud) infrastructure, giving the more security-conscious customers the peace of mind to have everything within their own infrastructure, which is already under audit control.

Media professionals… Start your engines!

With the halt in productions in Q2 and Q3, there is now a backlog of material that needs to be processed and distributed to a growing number of platforms. Leveraging AmberFin in the cloud is the fastest way to transcode and still achieve the highest quality results. And for those companies that are now coming to the end of the lifespan of their on-premises transcoder capacity, they should consider going straight to Dalet AmberFin Cloud Transcoder. More options, better flexibility and agility to run your business.

The post Trailblazing Transcoding in the Cloud. appeared first on Dalet.

“Hey Guys, let’s re-invent the entire TV and Cinema chains from Camera to Screen!” said no high-ranking executive in any board meeting ever. The whole concept sounds like crazy talk when you say it out loud, but in reality that’s what the High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Wide Color Gamut (WCG) revolution have done over the recent years.

We’ve moved on from glowing goop 

The cinema world, shooting on film, has always had a little more freedom that the TV world when it comes to controlling brightness, color and contrast between the camera and the screen. There were limitations in physics and chemistry, of course. You could make the projector brighter assuming you didn’t melt the film and you could make the film more sensitive provided you liked that grainy look on the screen. The TV world, however had a fixed and inflexible transmission infrastructure that was stabilized in the 1950s. The relationship between the photons going into a camera and the photons coming out of most of today’s TV are still based on the response characteristics of the glowing goop you find inside CRTs (Cathode Ray Tubes) of that early era.

So in comes HDR. “Hey guys the eye can capture about 14 stops of brightness so let’s transmit that.” is the fundamental idea behind HDR. In a basic MPEG system, the brightness of most pixels is represented by a number between 0 and 255. This gives you the ability to represent 8 stops (28 values) whereas we would like to represent 214 values in our HDR chain i.e. the brightness of each pixel is represented by a number between 0 and 16383. Sounds simple really. But, what is Dolby Vision HDR?

Let’s redesign the entire Cinema and Broadcast Value chain 

The complexity comes with making sure that each and every device in the value chain from camera through switcher and ingest and transcode understands what these new numerical values actually mean. In an ideal world we would replace all the old kit with brand new kit, but that’s not really practical so the HDR systems that were created have compatibility modes to allow these new bright, colorful pixels to travel across traditional SDI, H.264 and IP transmission paths with good integrity to appear at the final display to show wondrous pictures.

Now, what is Dolby Vision HDR? Dolby Vision is one of the HDR systems that requires metadata to work. Its trick is identifying that in any typical scene you only use a portion of the total available dynamic range. A dark shadowy scene in a cave will need more bits allocated in the small numerical pixel value ranges. A bright seaside scene on a sunny day will need more bits allocated in the large numerical pixel value range. This scene by scene adaption is enabled with metadata that tells each device how to behave for that scene. The Dalet AmberFin team is really proud that it’s the first software only transcoder and workflow engine to have full support for the Dolby Vision system. It can do this in a wide range of different codecs in parallel with the usual array of high quality video processing functions from scaling to Standards Conversion.

The Dolby Vision metadata itself might be carried in a sidecar XML file or embedded within the media file as a data track. Whichever mechanism is used, it’s vitally important to retain the synchronization between the metadata and the images to get the best results particularly when aligning metadata changes to hard cuts in the video. This becomes doubly important when frame rate converting because blended frames and mis-timing of metadata combined are highly visible, highly annoying and consume a lot of bitrate in the final encoding. A transcoder like the Dalet AmberFin platform gets all of those complex factors right first time, resulting in high efficiency, low bitrate, outstanding picture.

In today’s era, the consumer often lead the professionals 

So, what is Dolby Vision HDR and why is it important? HDR is important because the consumers of media get to see HDR on the content they make on their mobile devices. If the paid-for entertainment content they see on other platforms looks washed out and old-fashioned by comparison, then this will be a factor in what media gets consumed. If anyone has a spare crystal ball to help predict what this future might look like, then I would be very grateful to borrow it for a while!

The post What is HDR, WCG and Dolby Vision and why does it matter? appeared first on Dalet.

Considering current global events around mobility and remote working, this is a highly topical discussion.

One-size-fits-all solutions do not exist!

In the unused bit at the back of my brain, I know that there is no such thing as a one size fits all solution, but at the same time I cling to the everything cloud marketing philosophy as some kind of justification for forward motion. Very often, it’s a mix of technologies that gives the best performance for a given price and it’s the ability to choose the right technology at the right time for the right job at the right price that ensures that any business continues to thrive.

Transcoding is a curious business. To select a service or a device, you first must be sure that it meets your needs for scaling, deinterlacing, frame rate conversion, image filtering, SDR and HDR conversion, range of codecs, compression efficiency and compression quality. In today’s time-pressed environment choices are often done with a service rate card rather than by testing with real content and real people. This is a shame because very often the idea of taking a high-quality device with a Capex price tag is eliminated, even though the per-transcode costs of an alternative service can be higher for a lower quality.

Nothing is ever simple – what’s the real business problem?

So why all this heavy philosophy? Dalet asked me to look at a hardware accelerator for an offline transcoder. I initially thought that I had stepped into a time machine because that sort of solution is just not fashionable now. I stopped and thought about it for a while in the context of todays reduced operating margins, remote infrastructure requirements and ever-increasing platform support requirements.

If you have a fixed and stable volume of content that needs to be converted every day / week / month then actually the costing of that core transcode is a key fixed cost of the business. If a hardware accelerator reduces that fixed cost with a one-off investment rather than a pay as you go continuous commitment, then it is a no-brainer providing you still have a local data center to house it and you have the ability to manage it remotely.

There is a business sweet spot for accelerators!

So I found myself looking at an HEVC encoding accelerator, connected to a cloud-enabled Dalet AmberFin transcode farm and realized that it was the right solution for many customers to fulfil their core needs of doing a lot of transcoding for the minimum TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). Like many things in engineering, it might not be fashionable or glamorous, but for the right application it makes good business sense. 

It serves the needs of working and managing remotely, since you can build a hybrid architecture that works in the background and yet, can be accessed anytime, anywhere, assuming your data center has some solid business continuity in place (let’s face it, who doesn’t these days?) 

As 2020 makes its way, with major issues at global scale, it seems that there is a sweet spot for hardware accelerators – high throughput with less energy consumption than a raw software solution. It also seems that I should avoid jumping on today’s fashionable technology for everything and to keep my mind open to a wider range of practical solutions to solving real business problems!

The post Virtualization – is it always best? appeared first on Dalet.

The content creation workflow is currently very unwieldy with multiple incompatible processes, all using different technology. IMF’s goal is to streamline this and have a common set of processing and rules that take us from the director’s vision for the film, to the manufacture and distribution of cinema variants, film variants, and versions for other distribution channels such as television and the internet. In simple terms: creative operations in the hands of capable people; dull and repetitive tasks automated using IMF processes.

Various Components

IMF provides the specification to separate the content into various ingredients or components (namely, MXF media files), a number of ‘recipes’ (Composition Play Lists, or CPLs) and a selection of instructions (or Output Program Lists, or OPLs) appropriate for each of those audiences. 

The ingredients – different versions of scenes, clips to be used in trailers and promotions, language tracks and so on – will exist as separate AS02 media files inside an IMF bundle. So content needs to be captured, ingested and transcoded where necessary.

The CPL – the recipe – will be created for each version as an editing process, although some of this is likely to be automated.

The OPL – the delivery instructions – will be standardized: there will be rules on what formats are required for each territory and customer.

AS02 will in effect become the carrier for the raw data essence, while the CPL and OPL will represent the individual recipes and instructions for each territory and version. IMF encompasses not just file storage, but also the CPL and OPL details for each version as well as a packing list to ensure that the right components end up in the right version of the content.

Automated Conversion of IMF

Once IMF is rolled out in to the content creation workflow, we will begin to see IMF appearing in the drop boxes of tier 1 broadcasters. At that point the need to automate the conversion of IMF to other formats such as the Digital Production Partnership (DPP) will become important: this is essentially what the OPL does. Both IMF and DPP have strict rules for file and metadata creation, and both are solving business problems with stringent requirements. As a result, automating the exchange between the two should be straightforward, with less need for human interaction within that process. The DPP format has been recognized as an international standard (MXF AS11) and, while some broadcasters around the world may adopt it, others may define their own preferred file delivery format. Under IMF, another format would just be another OPL, another set of delivery rules.

IMF sits at the top of the food chain of these interoperable applications, which solves the very specific issue of how to manage the data essence that resides within a large number of versions. IMF will feed the food chains of DPP and other content exchange applications. Because both IMF and DPP are so well defined, this facilitates a high level of automation and efficiency, and lower costs, as well as a significant increase in media re-use.

What is unclear at this stage is whether content from a broadcaster such as the BBC or Channel 4 will ever actually see an IMF file that will have to be converted to DPP, or if this process will be done by third parties such as post production specialists like deluxe, by the content creators (Disney, for example) or in the cloud as an on-demand service. However, what is certain is that it can all be done automatically by the Dalet AmberFin media processing & mastering platform, regardless of who owns the software. If you want to find out more about IMF, watch our IMF webinar replay and check out our dedicated white paper:

The post IMF: How Does it Work and Who will Use It? appeared first on Dalet.

Separate the content into various ingredients 

Most films these days have thousands of different main and promotional versions for each individual market, as well as airline and television edits, etc. With IMF, you won’t need to create a thousand plus copies of the content; what the standard does is separate the content into various ingredients or components (namely, AS02 MXF media files), a number of ‘recipes’ (Composition Play Lists) and a selection of instructions (or Output Program Lists) appropriate for each of those audiences. IMF is designed to take the right mix of ingredients, the right recipe and a tailored set of instructions, to create a dedicated version for each market, without having to duplicate files.

Create a standard package to simplify the creation of multiple versions 

Currently, editors still need to put together individual edits and ship these to each market. What IMF will do is to circumvent this lengthy, and not to mention costly, process by creating a standard IMF package which will go everywhere, and instead of shipping a specific media file, to say Malaysia, you will simply have to validate the editing list and send this to the territory where the appropriate version will be rendered from the master media files. This isn’t to say that you don’t need the same level of skill and discernment during the editing process as we currently have. What it does mean though, is that the data transfer will be significantly less and the number of processes and duplication of effort and file creation necessitated by all the file formats received, will be significantly lower. 

Almost there! 

While it is still in a draft specification, the standard is making great progress and is currently getting close to final review by SMPTE. It is supported by over 100 companies worldwide, including major studios and broadcasters, vendors and manufacturers like AmberFin. Efforts are also underway to rally wider industry support for the initiative.

If we get it right, IMF will become one of the most significant bits of hidden technology in our industry. From the end-user perspective, IMF will not be something they ever see, but which will bring significant efficiencies to their workflow; the idea is that it will be so boring, it will all just work. Read my second post on IMF here.

The post What is IMF and Why Should You Care? appeared first on Dalet.

Is this correct or are some commentators perhaps guilty of over-emphasizing the issue? I’m not sure, but there is one thing that I do know for sure – if you are considering a move towards IT-centric operations then it is critical that you start by getting your IT base correct.

It’s Not as Simple as a Trip to PC World 

Before starting to adopt file-based workflows it is essential that you install the right IT backbone and then add the video workflow to it. In the same way that you wouldn’t trust an IT guru to define the video workflow, so why do we think we are good enough to design the IT system and get the redundancy, throughput, latency, power/heat, security, permissions, administration, price point and ROI correct?

From our perspective at AmberFin, we see that there is some tremendously powerful and versatile IT backbone technology around. The trick is investing in technology that is best suited to your business plan, your staff and your budget today, whilst offering you the right opportunities to build and expand in the future.

Let the DPP Help You Define Your IT Architecture 

The nightmare scenario is when you sink everything into an IT platform that effectively leads you down a blind alley. In this respect, the Digital Production Partnership (DPP) offers you an incredibly valuable source of guidance and relevant standards.

The DPP provides a framework that enables the UK broadcast industry to share best practice to help producers and broadcasters maximize the potential of digital production. It also provides guidance on the standardization of technical and metadata requirements, helping to ensure digital video content can be easily and cost-effectively distributed to audiences via multiple platforms.

If you have not already contacted them, I strongly recommend that you visit the DPP website where you will find a treasure trove of information and contacts that could save you a huge amount of time, heartache and money.

Let AmberFin Help You Build a Workflow that the DPP Would be Proud Of 

Once you have the IT infrastructure in place, the key to good workflows is good, accurate metadata.

Start with a simple transcode farm, migrate some QC processes around the ingest point to improve upon the quality of technical, descriptive and timeline metadata. Then join the metadata up to the farm to allow auto-segmentation based on metadata. Base is all on open standards like MXF, AS11 and the DPP specifications and you’ll be heading into an interoperable future.

The post The DPP Can Help You Design Workflows that Work for Legacy Formats appeared first on Dalet.

Hold on a second, I hear you say, if interlace is so bad, why was it ever invented and what the heck am I going to do with all this interlaced content I still have?

To answer that question, we must once return to the dawn of television history. The whole chain, from camera to home receiver, depended upon valves and diodes: devices that could barely keep up with any sort of video bandwidth. So interlaced scanning was invented to give the illusion of vertical detail within the constraints of the electronics of the time.

Interlace is a simple compression technique (if you are feeling generous) or a fudge (if you are not). The basic trade off is how many vertical lines of television resolution can you achieve for a given frame rate in a given signal bandwidth. Interlace is a compromise to transmit 60 (or 50) pictures a second at half the vertical resolution: all the odd lines in the first picture, then all the even lines in the second. You only need half the bandwidth, you get twice the vertical resolution and you fool the eye into seeing smooth movement at effectively 60 (or 50) frames per second.

And just like maggot therapy, we really don’t need to do this any more because we have better options. Modern solid state electronics and digital processing are more than capable of supporting true 50 fps, or indeed 120 fps, or a more international 150fps. With proper progressive scanning. Without compromise.

With each passing year, it gets harder to correctly display interlaced pictures. You just can’t buy CRTs any more. Plasma, LCD, OLED and the rest are all progressively scanned screens. To show an interlaced television stream on them, these devices have to convert it internally to progressive scanning. Broadcasters and creative producers have no control over how this will work inside the television or set-top box, and what artifacts it will add to the image.

Many producers take great care over the look of their content. They may choose to shoot in a “film look” mode, at 25 fps. They may choose to shoot 50p to capture fast movement. What they have in common is that they want viewers to see what they created. Converting everything to an interlaced scan just for the hop from the broadcaster to the home means that the way that vision is preserved is entirely dependent upon the de-interlacer in the receiver, a chip likely chosen by the manufacturer solely on the basis of cost.

One of the great advances in the HEVC specification is that it does not support interlace. It is simply not there: all the transmission modes assume progressive scanning. Ding dong, the witch is dead!

However, if your content was created in an interlaced format or restored from an archive in an interlaced format, don’t give up! Passing it through a professional de-interlacer such as the Dalet AmberFin iCR will at least ensure a clean progressive signal, free from artifacts, going in to the HEVC encoder. The iCR is also the perfect host for a software-based HEVC codec. iCR integrates high quality de-interlacing within a generic transcode platform, and tightly couples transcode to a variety of media QC tools to check quality before delivery.

The post Standing Tall on the Interlace Soap Box with HEVC appeared first on Dalet.

It is reassuring when you see that what you have been advising customers for years is supported by a leading broadcast industry body – QC is key!

EBU Gets Serious About QC 

The EBU recognized QC as a key topic for the media industry in 2010. In 2011 it started an EBU Strategic Programme on Quality Control, with the aim to collect requirements, experiences and to create recommendations for broadcasters implementing file-based QC in their facilities. 

The EBU Strategic Programme on Quality Control (QC) has identified four main use cases:

1. Ingest

2. Legacy archive transfer to files

3. Final programme delivery

4. Programme exchange

The work of the EBU is essential in the pursuit of standardization of QC testing. Through this work it defines what a QC test is, what the QC metric should be called and what it looks like. Adopting the EBU guidelines enables content owners to take a media file and pass it through numerous third-party QC products and then to collate the results in a meaningful way. In today’s world of multiplatform delivery this is absolutely critical. 

QC’s Periodic Table of Tests

The EBU has created a ‘Periodic Table’ of QC tests, which is a visual representation of the different tests that users might wish to implement. Just as users need a visual representation of the tests, they also need a visual representation of the test results. This is AmberFin Unified Quality Control’s (UQC) raison d’être – it is exactly what UQC provides.

To provide complete coverage of the EBU Periodic Table of QC tests a user will need more than one QC tool since some specialize in certain areas, but no one tool provides every test. AmberFin UQC enables users to select from a broad range of ‘best of breed’ QC system that provide very specific capabilities and integrate them on a single platform. The results of all the tools are displayed on a single user interface.

The post What the EBU Says About QC in a File-Based Media Environment appeared first on Dalet.

However, this is not the case here – the DPP specifications create a real life platform that offers the potential for broadcasters and facilities of all types to revolutionize their production workflows. They enable organizations to adopt digital file-based workflows in ways that are both efficient and cost effective. The specifications enable organizations to adopt file-based technologies for intra- and inter-company media transfers. It finally consigns the ‘sneaker-net’ to the rubbish heap of history.

The DPP organization has been instigated by the UK broadcast industry, for the UK broadcast industry. It is an initiative formed by the UK’s public service broadcasters to help producers and broadcasters maximise the benefits of digital production. The partnership is funded by BBC, ITV and Channel 4, with representation from Channel 5, Sky, S4C and the independent sector on its working groups. 

DPP Specifications – A Unique Proposition

Today, the DPP organization is unique. It has taken all the hard work it took to create the SMPTE MXF specification nearly 10 years ago and developed a set of Application Specifications for the UK industry that transform this technical standard into a real world business platform. Looking at it from an international perspective, the DPP specifications are the first of these Application Specifications to receive national scale adoption. It certainly won’t be the last.

Although its focus is strictly UK-based, the DPP specifications offer a model that could be equally applicable to any other regional market. As we know from our conversations at AmberFin, broadcasters and facilities in many other countries are closely following the progress of this first project of its kind.

As the saying goes, a racehorse designed by a committee ends up looking like a camel. But it is not the case here. The DPP organization draws on industry experts from the worlds of technology and broadcast production to help fulfill its remit. It is refreshing to see design engineers from so many different organizations, including competitive technology vendors, working together to create a single integrated set of format descriptions, and thereby a level playing field.

Lessons from the DPP Focused Webinar

And the industry really is behind the DPP specifications. As we saw earlier this year, when we staged a special DPP focused webinar, there is a groundswell of support for the DPP specifications from major broadcast industry players such as Channel 4, Red Bee and TVT.

The DPP organization has been successful in establishing a road map in digital production in the UK. The DPP specifications provide a framework that enables the UK industry to come together and share best practice in digital production and help producers and broadcasters maximize the potential of the digital revolution. Also, it leads the standardization of technical and metadata requirements within the UK, helping to ensure digital video content can be easily and cost-effectively distributed to audiences via multiple platforms.

And now, at IBC, we hear news of the first adopters of the DPP specifications. BT Sport is an imaginative and impressive new channel launch. Its adoption of the DPP specifications will simplify delivery of content to other broadcasters. 

This is just the start. At AmberFin, we whole-heatedly support the DPP organization here in the UK. We believe it has the ability to transform the UK broadcast industry. Furthermore, we believe it provides a blueprint that could be easily adopted in many other international markets.

The post Do We Need Reminding Just How Beneficial DPP Can Be? appeared first on Dalet.

Those 30 words are lifted from the new Dalet AmberFin brochure and are hugely significant. Why so significant? To truly understand, we must explore the history of AmberFin technology, while also looking into the future of our industry and what that means to us.

AmberFin, the company, was formed in 2008, but the technology goes far beyond that, originating as two projects at Snell & Wilcox. These two projects were wrapped together to form iCR – a high-quality mastering appliance with ingest, transcode and playback functionality. iCR progressed into a suite of software products and modules, still focusing on the same three functions, but with a task-orientated user interface, facilitating QC review, mark-up and metadata entry. As media facilities moved increasingly towards file-based workflows, emphasis on the transcode functionality increased and iCR Farm, a scalable, high-availability implementation of the AmberFin product, was launched in early 2012. AmberFin technology has always been well-placed to address the changing needs in our industry from appliance, to software product, to a scalable redundant system with flexible network licensing. 

Anticipating the future requirements of media organizations, Dalet has enabled AmberFin technology to evolve further into the Dalet AmberFin platform. Far more than a simple re-positioning of the AmberFin brand, this has involved fundamental enhancements to the architecture and re-factoring of many core components – ensuring that Dalet can continue to offer software products targeted at the same ingest, transcode, mastering and QC review applications, as well as provide MAM-driven business solutions with great media processing under the Dalet Galaxy platform.

Crucially, as the consumer demand, infrastructure design and business models of our industry continue to change, the Dalet AmberFin platform will again be well placed to answer the business needs of media organizations across the globe.

The post The Evolution of Dalet AmberFin appeared first on Dalet.

It’s a nice change for me to be the newbie and to learn new things. I’m a pretty quick learner, but I like to keep an open mind because there are a lot of people out there who are smarter than me but not everyone is prepared to tell me to my face. Joining the Dalet team has shown me a bunch of those smart people and the results of some of their work. I can’t tell you about all the secret things in the lab. However, I can talk about one subtle, but very important thing that I discovered…

I was using the Dalet News Pack to find out how it worked and how we can integrate AmberFin‘s technology to make it even better. After about 30-40 minutes it struck me that I was using a single integrated piece of software. I know that under the hood there are many different tools, libraries and other elements that come together to make this product, yet my learning experience felt pretty natural and intuitive. This doesn’t happen by accident. I know that many people will have sat down and looked at what a user actually does with the software as well as how they interact with it. Creating a single user experience is actually a tough thing to do. Keeping things both consistent and good requires strong management of the product and a vision of what the product needs to be for the end users.

Why is this a good thing for our customers though? I have helped a lot of customers with a lot of complex workflows and the one thing that I consistently hear is how hard things can be to learn. Making a product easy and consistent in its experience encourages users to try new things and it also gives different operators from different teams the ability to help each other. Reducing learning and training time saves money and increases productivity for the owner of the system. It encourages diverse users to feel part of the same team and reduces the “fear of the unknown” when new workflows need to be investigated.

I must say that I have been impressed so far with my experiences here at Dalet. I understand why customers like the Dalet MAM so much. Now it’s time to learn the Dalet OneCut editor so that I can deliver our YouTube training videos using Dalet’s own tools.

The post Things I’ve Learned in Dalet – The Unified User Experience appeared first on Dalet.

It’s refreshing to see a broad range of different customers appearing on the Dalet booth for demos. At AmberFin, the average customer who wants a demo is tech-savvy and has a variety of delivery specifications that they need to make yesterday because there is an urgent rush to install a transcode farm. The MAM customers seem to range from operators to journalists to engineers, in fact a whole cross section of interesting users. I am continually impressed by the ability of the Dalet Galaxy platform to offer a single user experience to this wide range of end-users. Not only does it give a feeling of uniformity to the product, it also seems to allow the broad range of end-users to feel as though they are working the same way as part of a team. An important take-away in this crazy world.

The show floor is populated with the usual array of microwave dishes, audio mixing consoles, tripods, cameras and utility bags. Increasingly, all the other booths have a mix of laptops and servers connected to GUIs with grey backgrounds. Broadcast Asia has gone IT with a minimum of fuss, but a maximum of problem solving. In addition to the main software tools, like those from Dalet and AmberFin, there are specialist subtitling, scheduling and studio tools that cater for stations big and small. We really have entered the world where anything you can think of can be created in software on a standard platform with a minimum of specialist hardware around the outside. Surprisingly, there isn’t much video on IP or 4k on display. Both of these “big ticket” items from the last 24 months seem to be taking longer than predicted to reach around the globe and gain real traction. It seems that technology never explodes quite as quickly as popular predictions would have you believe.

If you’re at Broadcast Asia then come along and I’ll tell you all about how industrialization principals can help you save money and increase profitability. If you’re not at the show, then look out for the same topics appearing here as a series of blog posts between now and IBC.

The post Broadcast Asia – A Slice of Normality in a Crazy World appeared first on Dalet.

While this may seem like yet another broadcast industry consolidation story, this acquisition is in fact a good thing, a very good thing, for Dalet, for us, our customers and for the industry as a whole.

As you know, we were a venture capitalist owned company for 6 years, 2 days 8hr 26 minutes. When Dalet looked at us, they saw a fantastic video-processing engine that would really complement their skills with metadata and workflow orchestration.

The whole reason for this acquisition is to combine our sales, technology and new products to create better offers for our customers. Over the last few years, we have concentrated all our engineering brains on making the best possible media, whether it be video, audio or captions, while Dalet has been developing some of the industry’s best workflow systems. So when you put together the best of MAM and the best of media together, the result will be nothing short of awesome, trust me. Together, we now have the ability to create the best-in-class MAM/workflow/video platform for the high-end market.

Now it’s also important to say that we will continue to develop, support and expand AmberFin from our home in Basingstoke. The AmberFin brand will not disappear: just like in one of those modern marriages, we are keeping our name. At the same time, Dalet Galaxy will continue to support other transcoders, and iCR will continue to be sold with other MAM vendors whenever appropriate to the needs of our customers.

So, as you can tell, we are excited by this union. By merging our resources, our people, our talent, and technologies, we can enrich both the Dalet and AmberFin products to offer the most forward-thinking solutions for content providers.

Come visit us on our booth at NAB and let us show you just how great our new family is and most importantly, how we can help you streamline your workflow and reach new levels of efficiency and quality. (Wedding gifts not required).

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