XOS Teams With Sony To Make Thunder Part of an HD Strategy

For college video professionals facing the daily challenge of how to move their programs from SD to HD, XOS Technologies and Sony have announced a partnership that provides a transitional road. XOS’s Thunder digital coaching-analysis platform is being integrated with Sony’s XDCAM optical-disc technology, offering a more efficient workflow through faster ingest, a more complete metadata model, and an easily upgradeable path to HD.

“Within Thunder, XOS now has a roadmap for HD,” says John Mills, director of product marketing for XOS. “Sony XDCAM camcorders are SD/HD cameras, so today, they can have a very efficient SD workflow. When Thunder is ready and upgraded to HD, they can make a very easy switch within the camera and have an HD workflow in place.”

XOS set out two primary workflow goals for the XDCAM integration. Most XOS customers already work in a tapeless environment, so the aim of the partnership was to take into consideration speed of ingest and an enhanced metadata model.

“We’re very happy with our speed-of-ingest results,” Mills says. “We now have 2½-times-real-time ingest from XDCAM disc.”

Planning metadata was the second goal of the partnership. College video professionals want to be able to record metadata on XDCAM disc during games and practices, identifying the types of plays being recorded as they happen.

“Teams break down plays by offense, defense, and special teams, but there is a total of eight categories that plays are marked into during practice,” Mills explains. “Sony created a solution using a keypad interface that allows users to make those individual plays on the disc. Within Thunder, we’re able to read that metadata off of the disc and populate those specific fields.”

That means that, when coaches come off the field and ingest their video, plays are already tagged through the metadata fields that the video operator tagged on the keypad while in the field.

“That allows our end users a very efficient workflow,” Mills says.
   
Sony and XOS have a long-standing relationship, so this partnership was comfortably accomplished through site visits on both sides and a mutual commitment to the product. The two companies demonstrated the solution at the American Football Coaches’ Association convention this week in Orlando, FL, showing how Thunder supports DVCAM .mxf files shot by XDCAM camcorders.

“The feedback has been great,” Mills says. “Everyone who has seen it has been very responsive. They like the workflow, and they love the HD-strategy story.”

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