Optimize both quality and productivity using time-based metadata.
With so many choices to consume content, how do media companies attract and retain viewers? While the content itself will always be the main driver, increasingly how customers engage with a content source is as important as what that content is. In an era where so many companies are competing for direct customer relationships, the importance of a great customer experience has become paramount. This consumer experience starts with the discovery of new content, the ease of the user interface, and continues through to the flawless playback of video at the highest quality levels. Consumers have little patience for drops in audio and video quality, and they will easily disengage.
Delivering the experience that consumers demand requires content providers pay more attention to content quality and, to ensure that quality, gain access to the most advanced tools for preparing their content. But for a media company that has a fixed infrastructure with on-premises equipment, taking advantage of the latest tools is difficult and expensive.
Cloud-based media supply chains, such as those enabled by SDVI Rally, abstract the tools needed for preparing content from the underlying infrastructure, and allow operators the freedom to select the best tool for any given job, or switch tools as and when necessary. These supply chains are constructed to manage and prepare content from the moment it arrives all the way through handoff to a multitude of distribution partners. Along the way, some of the processing will be automated and some steps will require manual intervention. Automated tools are great for the heavy lifting, making processing tasks much faster and more efficient. But no matter how much of a supply chain can be automated, some use cases still require manual checks to ensure that everything is as it should be.
Nowhere is this combination of automated (jobs) and manual tasks (workorders) more important in the supply chain than with Quality Control (QC). Automated tools can ensure that the video meets technical specifications. However, no matter how good the automated tools may be, it is very often necessary to have additional manual checks to review the video and audio when issues have been detected, as well as to spot-check subtitle language and placement, ad break placement, artwork, rights metadata and more.
The beauty of running supply chains with the Rally platform is how seamlessly it integrates and manages both the automated and manual steps in the media supply chain. Rally’s unique capabilities for handling time-based metadata (TBMD) mean that metadata generated by automated QC processing is then used to direct the manual tasks to the exact points in the video that need human attention. Manual QC checks become significantly more efficient since operators don’t have to waste time searching through content to find those points that need review. In conjunction with the Rally workorder system, this auto-generated data flows directly to the operators and tools that need it.
Rally Access is an extension to the Rally platform that provides the core capabilities to process and normalize time-based metadata, control the flow of metadata to operators through workorders, and to provide direct access to those key events from within the tools that best suit the job and the user. Up to this point, Rally Access has been available only via Adobe Premiere Pro®, but we’re pleased to announce availability of Rally Access for Accurate.Video Validate.
“It was this deep metadata integration that made the collaboration with SDVI so compelling.”, said Rickard Lönneborg, CEO of Codemill. “We could take the Rally-generated TBMD and integrate that directly into the Accurate.Video Validate tool to make manual QC and compliance workflows much more efficient. Markers on the video timeline direct operators to the exact spot in the video where they need to review or make corrections. With just a few clicks, operators can review video quality, audio levels, languages, subtitles, metadata and more.”
This capability was so compelling to the SDVI team, that Validate is now a fully integrated component of the Rally Access offering. As an entirely browser-based QC and compliance tool, any customer can now ensure that video quality is an integral part of any media supply chain. Rally Access users now have the option to use any combination of Premiere Pro and Validate, depending on the circumstance of the task.
And as I said at the beginning, in an era where the consumer experience is such a key component to the competitive differentiation of a media company, embracing a modern media supply chain that incorporates both automated and human video quality assurance is critical to ensuring the best video experience for your consumers.
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Learn more about Rally Access and Accurate.Video Validate.
