Visitors to the SBSS stand at the recent Mediatech Africa advanced technology
trade fair in Johannesburg were able to see the latest products from Digital
Rapids and Root6 Technology.
Digital Rapids manufactures products for encoding and transcoding, including
multi-format, high-performance hardware and software solutions for
professional applications such as post-production, broadcast, IPTV, video on
demand (VOD), mobile video, digital dailies, advertising, content protection,
corporate marketing, training, education, web distribution, security and more.
Also shown were products for live streaming, including flexible, scalable
solutions for live encoding, streaming and archiving with hardware-based de-
interlacing and noise reduction for industry-leading quality, ideal for live event
streaming as well as delivery solutions for fast, efficient digital delivery of HD, SD
and digital cinema media and metadata between content providers, contributors
and distribution partners over IP networks or satellites.
Said James Macpherson of SBSS: “Laserstream, the streaming division of
Lasernet, has chosen to use Digital Rapids through SBSS to stream content to
the web, point to multipoint, as well as point to point. A client will give
Laserstream a feed, video and audio and it is encoded and sent to a content
distribution network. From there any client can access it. Digital Rapids products
are used to enable this process and to ensure a high quality end product.’
Version 3 of Root6’s ContentAgent, a management tool for automated digital
workflows, was on show at the SBSS stand. Said Root6’s head of Product
Management Owen Walker: “We’re finding that there is a huge interest in this
product because everyone is going file based. ContentAgent is a universal
platform for managing, repurposing and distributing digital content and provides
seamless continuity of operation between acquisition, transcoding and
distribution.
“The system has been bought by several South African facilities including Searl
Street Post Production, Blade, Waterfront Post and Sasani Studios.
ContentAgent is resolution independent so you can bring in many different file
formats (including DPX, MOV, MXF and Red), transcode them to other formats
and do frame size and frame rate conversions in either SD or HD. Once the
transcoding is complete ContentAgent sends you an email alerting you to the
fact. ContentAgent can then automatically copy the file to a network.
ContentAgent also features integrated DVD and Blu-ray authoring.’
Two versions of the system are available – a software version and a hardware
version with video capture capabilities. Tektronix’s quality control system, Cerify,
can be integrated into ContentAgent to check video and audio quality.
A common application of ContentAgent is to view and automate digital dailies
workflows on feature films and television programmes as the system is able to
read the metadata on the files and prepare them for editing.
International users of ContentAgent include the BBC, Dreamworks, The Mill,
Technicolor, IMG and RDF.
For more on the products that were on show at Mediatech Africa, see
