Signiant’s Digital Media Galaxy

In 1987 AVID technology began life as a company and in the years that followed the entire workflow for editing film was to be changed forever. A core team of people were involved in the development of the AVID, from the initial idea by Bill Warner, to the technical creation of a system which still rules Hollywood today. Tom Ohanian was part of the AVID founding team, those who brought the Media Composer, the Film Composer and Avid Multicamera Systems into being.

Watch part 3 of this interview on MacVideo.

Here’s the start of one of many MediaPost articles that Tom Ohanian has written.

Imagine turning the water faucet on and never being able to turn it off. Eventually, a few things tend to happen. You get wet. Your stuff gets wet. If you’re in an apartment and you live above people, the people below you get wet. Their stuff gets wet. You get the picture. To avoid drowning, the best way, of course, is to turn off that water, but, alas, you can’t. It just keeps coming.The ever-increasing amount of digital media content that continues to hurtle towards us is mind-numbing and there is simply no way that faucet is going to be turned off. Gone forever are the days that only a few talented people could create programming. Now, anyone with a digital camera, a laptop-based editing system, and a Web site (or, if you will, insert YouTube here) can post content (whether it’s a real story as opposed to a fanciful clip I leave to you), and, shazam, it’s available to anyone in the world. As a result…

…Read the rest by clicking here.

Here’s the start of one of many MediaPost articles that Tom Ohanian has written.

Digital Nonlinear Editing (DNLE) systems have existed for more than 20 years as hardware/software alternatives to dedicated standalone silos. The progression of DNLEs is straightforward: first, DNLEs replaced dedicated tape-based editing systems in standalone configurations. Next, DNLEs assumed LAN-based sharing capabilities, enabling a limited number of editing stations to share content. Simultaneously, compressed picture quality (1989 at 250:1 software JPEG compression) improved and, ultimately, DNLEs were able to work in uncompressed video (and film) resolutions.

Flash forward to 2009. DNLEs exist in standalone and sharing configurations. The number of DNLEs that can be networked in a sharing environment can easily reach 100-200 and can perform real-time operations on X number of tracks. The more dedicated the DNLE is, and connected to DAS, Striped-DAS, High-Performance SAN, etc., the higher the number of tracks that can be played back in real-time (RT) without rendering. Typically…

…Read the rest by clicking here.

In part 2 of this interview Tom takes us back to the early days of AVID and talks about the reaction of the editing community to this new technology.

It’s an interesting interview/video, have a look.

Check out a recently published video of Tom Ohanian being interviewed on MacVideo TV. It’s the first in a two-part series. It’s a nice piece…

In 1987 AVID technology began life as a company and in the years that followed the entire workflow for editing film was to be changed forever. A core team of people were involved in the development of the AVID, from the initial idea by Bill Warner, to the technical creation of a system which still rules Hollywood today. Tom Ohanian was part of the AVID founding team, those who brought the Media Composer, the Film Composer and Avid Multicamera Systems into being.

In this Podcast, Tom Ohanian sits down with Ashish Basu, Interra Systems‘ VP of Sales & Business Development. Ashish provides a brief overview of the company and the two explain how Interra’s automated content readiness solution, Baton, integrates with Signiant’s Content Distribution Management software.

Tom and Ashish also discuss SIPP, Signiant’s newly launched product integration program and the benefits it provides to partners such as Interra Systems who have recently joined.

 

 Interra [12:39m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Below you’ll find the introduction to an article I wrote that was recently published in MediaPost…

AS A business traveler, I’ve witnessed a very interesting shift over the past two years. Business fliers, first to watch DVDs or videos on their laptops, are now watching movies and TV shows on their iPhones or iPod touch — while laptop playback is on the decline.

Now, this certainly isn’t a scientific study, but given how much I fly, it tells me that the ubiquity and ease of use of a mobile device will put more mobile media in the hands of more people faster than anything else thus far. This is worth noting since new technologies often find themselves in the hands of business travelers before they make the jump to the larger, more profitable consumer market.

So why should media professionals, Hollywood studios, wireless carriers (other than AT&T) and phone manufacturers (other than Apple) pay attention to this?

You can find the rest of the article on our web site at: http://www.signiant.com/company/news/apple-and-wal-mart/

Well, another IBC has come and gone. This was the 18th IBC that I attended and in my opinion, it was one of the best for a number of reasons. Among them: the number of attendees was the highest yet (49,250); the level of interest and the quality of the questions and discussions was high and meaningful—these were people who had serious research, design, evaluation, and purchase initiatives and came to the show prepared. Writing briefly from a Signiant perspective, we were in the IPTV/Mobile zone and the amount of foot traffic was excellent as one would expect from these two areas that are now of major importance to the media and entertainment industry. We had a constant stream of individuals and companies looking for the ability to move content from, to, and throughout their ever-growing media ecosystem of partners. We demonstrated our new Version 8.0 software which received fantastic reviews from our current customers as well as from people who were new to Signiant, and were honored to be part of NBC Universal’s IBC-award winning MICAH product.

As is usually the case, I didn’t get too far from the Signiant booth until the last day of the show when I typically have to run around and see what new products there are and what companies are innovating. One of the most impressive was Maximum Throughput. The MaxEdit Server Edition and Web Edition are excellent products and truly represent innovation. I remember seeing these products at NAB and they have changed quite a bit since then. I saw web-based editorial (what I refer to as “editing on the wire”) and changes made on the flash-based web version resulting in an edited sequence which you can access on an i-Phone. Further, Max-T actually has a neat review and approval app that they’ve built, complete with grease-marker capability to highlight/annotate areas and that newly marked up version shows up back in the LAN version (because you are always manipulating the content metadata at the source) I urge you to check it out.

It was a GREAT IBC show for Signiant and hopefully for you if you attended!

I first attended IBC in 1991, when we at Avid were just introducing the PAL version of the Media Composer. The show has certainly changed through the years and in 2008 it is very apparent that IT-based implementations are increasingly being adopted and put into practice. Unlike the warming sun of last year, it is a typical overcast, rainy Amsterdam but that has not had any effect on the crowds. Booths are busy and there is energy to the crowd unlike at NAB.

HD is certainly forming a large component of what people are looking at, but hardware and software applications to support IPTV and Mobile initiatives are getting their fair share of increased floor presence and associated foot traffic.

The theme for this year’s IBC is “the world of content creation, management, and delivery” and I think particularly we are seeing more emphasis on, in order, delivery and management than ever before. Any content creator who has a volume of content is now seriously looking at how to manage and to keep track of that content—hence must look at both asset management and content management systems. And, files must be distributed to all the locations that require them—to affiliate stations, cable head ends, telcos, and the vast amount of business partners that are part of this ever morphing world of what we call the media and entertainment industry.

One of the clichés in this business is “NAB is hectic and IBC is much more tranquil”. I don’t find that to be the case at all. In 1991, the pace of IBC was very slow. Today, the pace is fast and people are coming to make evaluations and to make decisions!

In this podcast, Signiant’s Tom Ohanian speaks with Current’s Chief Technology Officer, Steven Blumenfeld. Steven describes Current and explains that the company’s mission is to “democratize television”.  He states that although quality is important to Current, it’s not as important as the story and the in-depth reporting that’s involved in getting the story. Steven also describes the challenges of ingesting content from citizen journalists and where Signiant fits in by automating Current’s workflow, taking humans out of the equation and thereby eliminating human error. There’s a lot more interesting insight from Steven, have a listen.

 

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Tom Ohanian sits down with Mark Wilson-Dunn, BT’s Executive VP of Global Sales & Marketing for BT Media and Broadcast, to discuss BT’s partnership with Signiant and explain exactly what BT is doing in the media and entertainment (M&E) industry. Mark describes what the Mosaic solution is and why the demonstrations of it at NAB were so well received.

In addition to outlining BT’s offerings, the pair discuss the state of the media and entertainment industry, the concept of SaaS for M&E, the uniqueness of the M&E industry and how it operates as a true ecosystem, and much more. Have a listen.

 

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It’s been 19 years since the last Indiana Jones film, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and this year’s NAB was the 19th straight for me. In 1989, I vividly remember being sequestered in a hotel room (sounds intriguing, doesn’t it?) doing non-stop hour after hour demos of the Avid/1 Media Composer with 250:1 compressed images in a 160×90 playback screen and then, after doing demos from 8AM to 8PM, watching “…Last Crusade” on VOD (back then, that would be called Pay-Per-View).

Having just attended my 19th NAB, it is interesting to note how much has changed and how the M&E industry is adopting IT-centric approaches. What were those early Avid systems doing? Replacing 3/4” tape-to-tape cuts-only edit systems for offline editing. The landscape today? A variety of digital nonlinear editing systems (DNLEs), all of which can accomplish finished, uncompressed HD programming (provided the hardware, I/O, etc. can support the data rates).

It was also clear that file-based workflows, integrating with other applications, and digital media distribution are all factors that are entering into the equation of solutions for the M&E industry.

Last week, I participated on a Digital Hollywood Panel, which was titled “Revolutionized Digital Workflow Experience – Understanding How IT, Broadcast and Entertainment Production Merge”. This was moderated by Joel Ordesky, and was an excellent example of the themes that are characterizing the M&E industry. Adoption of file-based workflows, digital media distribution, and how adept organizations must spin up new workflows at a moment’s notice. Further, the interconnections between and among business-related systems will fuel knowledge demand to learn more about web-services implementations and service oriented architectures.

How to accomplish more with less is a resounding business reality. But reality for the M&E industry lies in the hands of the consumer, who is no longer waiting for content to be programmed at a certain time and certain date. The complexity of being able to provide multiple content formats at multiple resolutions, and to do it globally is not trivial. Intelligent systems that programmatically move content through its lifecycle will ultimately change the entire landscape of what we now know as “the edit suite” or the “post production facility” or the “broadcast news operation”.

This year’s NAB show was the 19th in a row for me. Over the last few years, it’s been quite a lackluster show: more of the same with little innovation and little in the way of addressing the multitude of developments occurring in the media and entertainment industry. And by that I mean that there’s a whirlwind of change for broadcast, film, etc. This year, however, I think most manufacturers “got it” and finally brought to market stories and in some cases (grin) products that actually address file-based ingest, manipulation, and distribution. We’re finally starting to see a concerted effort to create and embrace applications that straddle IT-centric infrastructure: servers, networks, and storage devices.

And, like all of us, adaptation is key. This is why I saw more software on the show floor than hardware. And when I did see hardware, there was much more emphasis on added-value software to differentiate the hardware. Software, software, software. Or, as they say in Vegas, “Software-baby” (yes, that’s what they say in Vegas, in case you were wondering).

NAB was a fantastic show for Signiant. We are very grateful to our existing customers with whom we had another chance to visit and to all of the kind people who came to our booth to talk about their requirements. We are honored to have received a Broadcast Engineering NAB “pick hit” award.

Earlier this week, The NY Times published an article about the head of the Federal Communications Commission and other senior officials considering taking steps to discourage cable and telephone companies from delaying the downloads and uploads of heavy Internet users.

Here are my thoughts on the subject…

The practice of limiting bandwidth utilization on a sustained bandwidth basis is extremely invasive to the media and entertainment industry. Imagine you are a professional journalist or a citizen journalist. You PAID and you PAY for a monthly contract with your Internet service provider for a guaranteed upload speed and download speed. And you just happen to have some footage that you’ve captured of a news-worthy event. And you start uploading that content to a news organization. Let’s say that you shot this on mini-DV tape which captures content at 25 mbits/sec (megabits/sec). And you have a “premium upload/download” package that “guarantees” you 5mbits/sec upload and 10 mbits/sec download. Now, in theory, you’re uploading 25 mbits/sec content and you can do this at a sustained 5 mbits/sec. (in other words, a 5:1 ratio. 1 second of video you want to send will take you 5 seconds). Well, that means your 50 seconds of video should take 250 seconds. So, you start uploading it and it seems to be going at the rate that’s part of your service level contract. But, say, 40 seconds into the upload you start to see a pronounced slow down of the upload. And, as time goes by, the upload progress bar is moving even slower. You are a victim of your provider throttling down your upload speed. And the ramifications? It’s great that you got the only footage of a newsworthy event. Now, why don’t you forget about uploading it and get in your car and drive the tape to the television station?

Great news this week for college sports fans via the joint announcement from CSTV and USATODAY. Let’s face it, there is a huge demand for college sports information and there are only so many minutes (uh… well, heavy sigh—unfortunately, mostly seconds…) devoted to college sports on network television broadcasts. The expansion of outlets for content that has such a large audience is yet another benefit to the sports fan and viewer. Where people consume the content that they are most interested in and when they do it is only going to grow. This is yet another indication that there are new file-based workflows, more and more venues for digital media, and that fueling that supply chain is not a trivial amount of work. And, what happens when those file sizes eventually grow from SD to HD? Imagine digital content going from camera to web page and multiply it by all those games, all those teams, all those additional items of interest (highlights, coaches’ shows, etc.) and you start to get an inkling of the intricate problems that have to be solved for that supply chain to not go dry.

Signiant’s Tom Ohanian and Tony Lapolito discuss their observations while at CES in Vegas.

Though Tony focuses on Panasonic’s 150″ Plasma TV, Tom’s biggest takeaway from the show is that companies are focused on servicing the consumer, now, more than ever. There’s also a lot of discussion about the many devices that are available today to deliver quality content to the consumer.

As always, there’s a lot of interesting banter and observations in this Podcast, have a listen.

 

 CES [13:08m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Listen in as Inside Digital Media ’s Phil Leigh interviews Tom Ohanian. Tom discusses how Signiant makes media move throughout the digital media supply chain.

Inside Digital Media is a place where you can see and hear interviews with thought leaders in the Digital Media industries.

 

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Well, how amazing is that? Beowulf comes out and does $28.1M on its opening weekend. What’s even more impressive is that the Imax® 3D version contributed $3.6M of that, or 13%, this according to the usual entities that track these figures (the Wall Street Journal reported). Regardless of where you sit on the “Is 3D a fad or is it here to stay” debate, what is not debatable is the revenue generator that 3D can be. For example, “Chicken Little” (2005) did 2.5X the box office than that of the 2D version.

And what does that mean for technology adoption and transition? Digital cinemas, digital projectors, digital cinema mastering and, yep, you guessed it, eventually those files aren’t going to be delivered on a set of redundant disk platters, but will be electronically delivered. The digital cinema supply chain issue is rapidly approaching and will require solutions for the managed movement of content. It will be necessary to administrate the clean-up and maintenance of those drives (ahem…perhaps I should say: solid state…); the transmission will have to be secured; there will be strict verification that the content arrived, and, ultimately, the content will need to be deleted. All automatically, according to contractually mandated schedules.

We’re getting there…break out the 3D glasses and look behind you. There ain’t no film up there, Ma…!

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of presenting at the Boston Avid Users Group, held at National Video Boston. It was great to see many of the colleagues that I worked with at Avid and also to meet new members. The topic of discussion was “Accelerating Avid-to-Avid Transfers” which showcased the Signiant-enabled Avid Transfer Manager integration that we’ve completed. Directly from the Avid interface, the user can initiate a transfer manager send and that content is then secured and WAN-accelerated to its destination. Meanwhile, the Signiant administrator can log into the Signiant central manager (see screenshot), see all the transfers, and interact with those transfers by adjusting their network bandwidth utilization to get content to its destination when it needs to be there.

After the presentation, there were a lot of great questions so it’s clear that moving digital media content over networks is of concern and that, if anything, being part of the digital media supply chain whether you’re an editor, graphics designer, sound mixer, etc. will continue to place demands on working in distributed, collaborative environments.

But, of course, because it was an Avid event, prior to my formal Signiant presentation, I told a few stories about the early days at Avid (I was employee #8). While preparing for the event, I had done some rummaging through my Avid archives and started off the night by playing back what I believe is the earliest known video of “The Avid/1 Editing System”. This was done in August 1987 and prior to the system being given its formal name: “The Avid/1 Media Composer” (that came much later, in 1989). The video that you see below is the early prototype that ran on an Apollo workstation. Notice that the editing model is quite different than the eventual source/record model that defined the product in its first release. In this video, however, the filmstrip model is much more similar to early Quantel products. In any case, enjoy. It’s a piece of digital nonlinear editing history.

You can also find the video on YouTube. May the force be with you.

 

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Customers and prospects keep asking the question…Does Digital Media Distribution helps the Media and Entertainment industry go green? You’re damn right it does. Tapes, dubbing, electricity, couriers (unless they’re on bicycles), traffic, exhaust, more tapes, DVDs, you know stuff that winds up in landfills….packages, bubble wrap, those disgusting packing peanuts that wind up everywhere…

Put a fork in it. Put digital media on networks. Move that content around. Schedule it and get it to where it needs to be. We have a customer who we spoke to yesterday who said that they needed to get a half-gig file from LA to Santa Monica and to a really creative guy who works out of his house. No gas, no traffic, no crazy lost productivity time. Cable modem, baby, open Internet!

WAN-accelerated software that secures and maximizes that open Internet connection. Voila! Happy customer, happier environment.

Paul Kedrosky has a post on the Fox Business/CNBC showdown (or as he calls it “smackdown”) that sets the stage nicely for what should be an interesting storyline heading into 2008 as major networks figure out how to capitalize on their digital media assets.

Whether or not Fox or CNBC becomes the first to put live, free, and streaming video on the web, there is an underlying thought that I think all of this is prefaced on. And that is that people want choice: choice of what content they’re going to watch, where they’re going to watch it, and when they’re going to watch it. And sites like YouTube only force us to understand that “choice” isn’t just the notion of programs online. The bottom line is that these “channels” enable you to see content from people who, for the most part, have no chance in hell of ever being on “broadcast television”. And what about the sheer nature of video on the web serving as either a fix for what ails you or research for something you’re working on? Wanna see close-ups of cataract eye operations? Yep, they’re right there. Wanna give your kid a quick introduction to Alvin and the Chipmunks? Yep, those frenetic furries are there too.

There was a point not too long ago when I watched Geoffrey Rush’s Oscar® winning performance in the 1996 film, “Shine”. I had seen the film when it first came out but watching the film again made me seek out “The Rach”, which for those of you who’ve seen the film know that this refers to Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 3—third movement. For a week or so, I was intensely interested in seeing as many performances of this piece. And “in the past”—oh you know—a year or so ago—I’d have gone to the library and hoped that there, in a fat chance, there would be an old, tired VHS tape of a performance. But, naturally, I didn’t do that. Instead, I went to that beautiful World Wide Web of interconnected computers and found some amazing performances, one of which is the unbelievable Horowitz who doesn’t even look as if he’s broken a sweat after 15 minutes and 13 seconds of playing.

The point: I entertained myself, found as much as I could handle and did it without turning on “the television” once. For that need, that Internet connection was beautiful….

And to Kedrosky’s point, would I have put up with ad-supported? Did it have to be free for me to partake? All I can say is that when you want to find something that’s meaningful to you, and immerse yourself in that subject, as long as it’s not an egregiously large output (money, banner ads, etc.), you’ll do it.

In this episode of the Digital Media Galaxy podcast, Tom Ohanian and Tony Lapolito discuss what’s been happening at Signiant these last few months. The pair discuss the recent success of IBC and Tom offers the details of a couple of new Signiant customers and the problems that Signiant solved. The two also dish on ravioli in Italy…you’ll have to listen in!

We hope you enjoy this podcast. If you have any comments or feedback, please email editor@digitalmediagalaxy.com.

 

 Signiant Update [39:39m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Ahh… the good old days when we all understood it. What it was, what it did, and what it offered. And today? When asked to define “television” do most of us even know where to start? Are we watching? Who’s watching? Which version of the show did YOU watch last night? Did you watch on that screen that is typically in your living room that either has an antenna or a coaxial cable attached to it? Or, did you watch “the show” after it aired as part of a five-day ad-supported download to your PC? Or, did you watch the show on you iPod after buying it online without commercials intact?

The alternatives for consuming content just continue to grow and grow. And they are doing so with dramatic acceleration. NBC-Direct, the newly announced initiative to offer ad-supported long form content of such shows as “Heroes” and “Bionic Woman” equates to yet another option for consuming media and entertainment programming.

Creating content and moving it to the appropriate locations, in the appropriate format and making it available not before, and up until, specific time periods involve a dizzying set of requirements to actually pull it off.

Moving content FHTTH (from Hollywood to the Home) means connecting to a server where content is ingested. It means moving that content from raw form to systems that are used to edit it and finalize it. It means moving it to and from the audio editorial and mixing stage. It means encoding that final content into the various forms that are needed for the final deliverables. Then it means adding the ad-supported commercials, banners, promos, etc. and adding DRM (digital rights management). And, of course, it all has to be populated on the viewer-facing website and moved to the CDN (the content delivery network).

To accomplish this at the dizzying rate that the Media & Entertainment industry is moving is no simple accomplishment.

I’m afraid I can’t help myself: I watch “television” on a piece of glass connected to a coax cable in my family room and on a computer screen and on an iPod. I’m not there on a mobile, but as a Red Sox fan, as we get closer to the playoffs, you never know….

Listen in as Tom Ohanian discusses the explosion of digital media and how you can service the Digital Media Supply Chain with so many distribution channels. Tom describes how you can go from content creation to ingest to manipulation to editing to transcoding and encoding and ultimately to delivering your media files.

 

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