Multimedia asset management made easy, cost-effective with Screening Room

The Internet and digital media technologies are rapidly converging to create the world`s most powerful communications environment ever. As a result, companies other than those in the media, entertainment and broadcast industries are beginning to realise the benefits of using video and other digital media to capture and store knowledge.

"With their video resources on the desktop, companies are ideally positioned to reach, inform and entertain employees, customers and partners via their intranet and the Internet," says Knowledge Focus managing director Piet Dempsey.

"Owing to a lack of an efficient and cost-effective management solution, however, most organisations` video assets remain largely under-utilised. Repurposing video means spending hours locating it among huge volumes of existing footage, followed by more hours manually shuttling the analogue tape to find specific frames."

Convera`s Screening Room, of which Knowledge Focus is the sole African distributor, simplifies the task of managing widely distributed and multi-formatted information by cost-effectively turning video assets into useful, profitable resources. The product`s fully integrated modules streamline video archiving and enable users to intelligently capture and index video content, accelerate the video production process and easily publish their repurposed video on the Web.

"With Screening Room, media producers can easily analyse, index and storyboard every major scene and event change in an archived video, and place that catalogue of video content on a corporate intranet for instant desktop or Web access," Dempsey explains. "Directors and editors can then find, preview and edit the segments they need for a particular program right from their desktops. Additionally, Screening Room uses the power of Convera`s RetrievalWare to find assets using either semantic or pattern recognition technologies."

Dempsey cites several international companies that have discovered the benefits of using Screening Room to successfully manage their video assets.

NEWCOM. is a German service company that designs, organises and manages extensive video and audio archives. The company archives data on IT systems with links to its clients` intranet networks, enabling customers to access and view their current archive status at any time. NEWCOM. uses Screening Room to analyse, index and retrieve 10 000 hours of video material. The product has saved the company so much time and money that it is now planning to let its customers retrieve and view the video sequences they need on an anytime-anywhere basis. To do so, Screening Room will be hooked up directly to the customers` intranets, which in turn have links to the NEWCOM. server.

US-based Sandia National Laboratories uses video as part of the training it provides to scientists and engineers who design, assemble and manage nuclear weapons. The natural language of the nuclear weapons engineers in video format has become indispensable to the training of newly recruited engineers. Sandia uses Screening Room to digitise, index and store its videotape archives so that authorised users can access the video content online, isolate the information they seek in a matter of minutes, and view relevant video footage, all from their desktop computers. The tool provides scalable access to any video asset (analogue or digital) from any Web browser.

PDD, a UK product design and innovation consultancy, says Screening Room puts it ahead of its competition by allowing it to manage its video research timeously and efficiently. PDD assists companies worldwide to help create and deliver groundbreaking commercial solutions and experiences, and uses video in its research to aid understanding as to why and how people choose and use certain products. The considerable amount of video and text material must be effectively stored, retrieved and analysed. Previously tape was stored with a video-editing program while Microsoft Word was used to tag notes to the timecodes. This was time-consuming and inefficient because researchers had to first find a tape, then the notes and fast forward and then rewind the tape to get to the portion that related to the Word file. Screening Room has solved this problem by tagging notes to the clips so that they can be quickly retrieved. By including Screening Room in its proposals, PDD helps convince potential clients that real portal benefits will be delivered and that users will find precisely the information they seek.

NASA flight controllers, engineers, scientists and other personnel often need to be able to review video documenting different events that occur at different times during one or more missions. The events are usually documented in segments scattered across multiple videotapes. Screening Room is used to digitally capture and catalogue all shuttle and station mission video content, which can then be browsed over the NASA intranet.

Knowledge Focus has rolled out Screening Room at two South African media companies, thereby enabling them to search and retrieve multimedia content quickly, easily and accurately.

M-Net`s kykNET installed the product in its video library containing more than 290 000 tapes. Although the library was well catalogued and ordered, archivists could only provide information on the title, synopsis and producer of a particular show. Actual frame-by-frame content of the tapes was not available. Screening Room allows kykNET to mine existing footage and run its business more cost-effectively. Archivists simply type in a word and a range of different footage is displayed.

"The value of being able to search through content intelligently cannot be underestimated," says Dempsey. "This solution puts M-Net on par with leading organisations such as Encyclopaedia Britannica and National Geographic Television and allows them to create additional markets for their video assets."

Knowledge Focus and its consortium partners IBM and IMOS also installed a multilingual multimedia information storage and retrieval system at The National Electronic Media Institute of South Africa (NEMISA) in Johannesburg, a broadcast and multimedia training institute set up by the Department of Communication as a skills development institution. NEMISA needed to store and easily retrieve information in a number of different formats, including paper, video, microfilm, electronic office files, audio files and photographs.

Knowledge Focus integrated the multimedia functions of Screening Room with RetrievalWare to enable NEMISA students and staff to store and retrieve information from various sources, while accurately using the 11 official South African languages.

Says Dempsey: "The error rate in searches is reduced because the Screening Room and RetrievalWare convert the information sources into binary code, rather than relying purely on Boolean or other search protocols. Information is retrieved on the basis of location, title, full text, pattern recognition and any other indexed metadata, and simultaneous searches can be done over indexed video frames, images, electronic and audio files and scanned paper documents."

"Organisations of all types need flexible, intelligent access to their video-based resources. Screening Room enables companies to easily capture, manage, repurpose and publish their video content using a single system. Not only is it a powerful management tool, but it can also radically cut production costs," Dempsey concludes.