QualityChecker
Intellectual validation and adjustment of video material produced inhouse and externally - a tool designed to streamline and optimize your archive migration process.
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Key tasks of NOA QualityChecker
- Transfer QC
- Baseband QC
- Lipsync checks
- Content coherency validation
- Trimming or segmentation
- Technical annotations and corrections
During systematic validation of video material multiple tasks and decisions have to be processed in the hundreds per day to approve content to be submitted - and the operator may go through quite a list of questions:
- Is the error coming from original playout, a faulty camera in use back then, from a previous migration, or a misshap at the service provider?
- Are there different capture attempts to be compared?
- Is the content within technical quality parameters?
- Do the actual state of the content and its descriptive metadata coincide?
- Is the material to be treated as a facsimile or is it an interpretation?
- Will I have to do trimming or extract individual segments from the material?
- Did my internal NOA FrameLector digitisation process or the service provider adhere to demanded quality standards?
When validating content for submission, the choice of the tool for assesment of content is crucial - especially when considering efficiency of the entire business processes.
Key features of NOA QualityChecker
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QualityChecker in the context of your facility
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In projects with multiple parallel ingest lines, there is no reliable way to supervise the process in real time. On the other hand, no one would like to repeat a mass digitisation project - there is no budget for that kind of games. Luckily, the ISR and RF information collected by NOA FrameLector saves you to actively monitor the signal - a dedicated QC operator is tasked to look on each digitised item for less than a few minutes to validate the ingest following defined business procedures which could be
- Being sure that no new errors have been introduced during capture
- Detecting content which was not mentioned in metadata at all
- Frame exact trimming and/or 1-n segmenting
- Validating QC data (ISR/RF, baseband analysis results)
Receiving 1000+ video files per week from a service provider, an archive is well-advised to create a process which validates at least 5 to 10% of all files to avoid problematic content delivery and to make sure, SLAs are met.
QualityChecker helps you to create a streamlined process which gives you full control (also with integrated baseband analysis results and reports) over the delivery of the service provider to check if:
- The files are well trimmed and lip synced
- Audio levels are well normalised and rearranged
- There are encoding artifacts visible
- Video levels are within EBU norms
There is a need for a high quality inspection tool as a stand-alone version for controlled submission towards any recipient?
QualityChecker allows you to quickly scroll through your content and spot view and listen to confirm validity - it may also be easily integrated into your existing AV workflow with a lightweight process engine.
With its connectivity capabilities, QualityChecker allows you to:
- Set up a stand-alone QC instance as independant 3rd party layer to your existing production environment
- Augment purely server-side 3rd party tools with a graphical user interface
- Quickly assess flagged content
- Freely configure most relevant quality lanes
...describes the process of confirming that no new errors have been introduced when migrating content from physical carriers to digital files. Electrical metadata in the form of ISR events and/or RF traces (100% no false-positive events) is forwarded by NOA’s capture application FrameLector and presented to the user in a clear timeline view as well as a marker list. Problematic areas can be identified within seconds, their content examined, and an informed decision can be made if the capture attempt is within quality parameters for the archive or if it has to be redone to achieve a better result. Multiple capture attempts can be compared in a time-code synced A/B comparison.
...are the two ways of storing video files captured from carriers within an Archive Asset Management system. The “facsimile” is an unaltered 1:1 copy of the original content (recommended in a lossless codec), whereas the “interpretation” of the carrier’s content may have corrected video and audio levels, or even re-arranged audio tracks to arrive at a normalized file format - still keeping the initial shape of the content.
QualityChecker offers frame exact trimming and 1-n segmentation (destructive / non destructive) as well as video level corrections based upon luma and chroma level traces in one glance. Content of audio channels may be annotated and then automatically rearranged and/or normalized based on a target profile. All changes may be applied immediately by NOA's MediaButler when encoding to target format(s) and/or saved for later processing upon retrieval of the material from the archive.
Y and chroma levels before / after correction when colorbar not representative
After encoding and before delivery, produced video files may be processed through a baseband analysis, which results (including false-positives in opposite to electrical metadata) are fed back into QualityChecker where they are displayed in individually configurable timelines. The operator may interpret results of solely picture/file-based analysis for burnt-in errors (e.g. originating from a previous migration, a camera problem, an encoding artifact etc.) and may then reject the submission with the target to capture the material from its original carrier, or another copy from a previous generation respectively.
Via timelines with clearly visible representations of luminance and chrominance levels of the entire recording and an easy to use calibration dialogue, operators may change video levels to specifications. A preview of this calibration is shown in QualityChecker in real-time, MediaButler will apply changes during final transcoding.
Example: luminance levels of a recorded video before calibration:
..and after correction, allowing for individual settings (“acceptable” level over e.g. due to a sun glare).
In the case of production of broadcast ready material, annotating the current state of audio roles in QualityChecker (via drop-down menus) will enable MediaButler to shuffle and/or level-correct individual audio tracks of the recorded video during transcoding to the final file according to predefined target parameters.
Alternatively, information from annotation can also be forwarded with the target file into the archive (without any changes applied to the audio signal), enabling quick retrieval of correct audio tracks upon ordering the material.
Via markers, multiple individual clips can be selected from one recording within QualityChecker to be exported by MediaButler as individual files during final transcoding in the background. Thereby, a carrier has to undergo digitization only once to produce every clip it contains. Multiple target scenarios are possible, for example:
1) Final archive format with tandem XML containing segment metadata for MAM
2) Multiple segments export to individual clips (archive, production format, preview etc.)
