Omneon, Interra offer grid-powered quality assurance application

Omneon, Inc. and Interra Systems have worked together to deliver the industry’s first grid-powered quality assurance application, the Interra Baton. The Baton application harnesses the inherent media processing capabilities of the Omneon MediaGrid active storage system. Employing the Omneon MediaGrid Processing Framework, the Baton software is now able to use the MediaGrid system’s many CPUs in parallel to deliver automated quality control of media files, while eliminating the need for separate QA hardware and additional external storage to perform the quality control (QC) function.

“With the advent of file-based operations in the media world and the proliferation of formats and delivery methods, quality control has become a very important and demanding function,” said Ashish Basu, vice president, sales and business development, Interra Systems, Inc. “Using the parallel processing power of MediaGrid, Baton provides a simple and elegant solution. The user already has the necessary hardware and processing power so no further investment is needed. The entire QC operation is set to automatically run in the background completely transparent to the user.”

MediaGrid was designed by Omneon not only to meet the storage capacity and bandwidth demands of large media files, but also to play an active role in the workflow of a facility by enabling the processing of media files while they reside in the storage system. By combining grid storage and grid computing, MediaGrid delivers the necessary storage while offering processing power for applications that run on it, such as Interra’s Baton system.

With MediaGrid as the central active storage running Baton, facilities can institute a highly efficient QC function that is automatic, integral to the workflow, and able to perform checks at all stages of the content lifecycle. For example, post-production facilities can use Baton to confirm that content has been encoded correctly and conforms to quality and format standards before delivery to customers. Likewise, broadcasters can check quality at ingest, after editing, and before playout for every delivery method including Internet and mobile TV.

“The Baton content verification system is a perfect application for MediaGrid active storage,” said Geoff Stedman, vice president, worldwide marketing for Omneon. “Other QC systems require additional hardware and become an additional step in the workflow. Baton, on the other hand, is a seamless fit, providing this necessary function automated and in the background while content resides within the MediaGrid system.”