Dalet Transforms Transcode-Workflow Orchestration

Dalet Digital Media Systems (Booth SL4525) is previewing a new approach to media-workflow orchestration. Available later this year, the Dalet Workflow Engine combined with the Dalet AmberFin transcoding platform improves orchestration of media workflows by leveraging a highly intuitive Business Process Model & Notation (BPMN) 2.0-compliant workflow designer.

Users are able to quickly and easily create complex workflow chains with little or no prior experience. Deployed workflows can be monitored at any level of detail with graphical and textual reporting of workflow instances.

“Combining workflow orchestration with a transcode platform is not a new concept,” says Director, Marketing, Ben Davenport, “and, in fact, Dalet AmberFin already does this to an effect. The new workflow approach from Dalet takes it a few steps further by distancing users from the complexities of transcode to make the process of media workflows familiar to anyone with an IT background, meeting our industry’s growing demand for more approachable workflow tools. By turning to the BPMN 2.0 standard, which is widely understood and used across any number of industries, we are able to bring a multitude of benefits to media processes, making them more understandable, shareable, future-proof and deployable, while BPMN skills learned in other markets are immediately transferable.”

BPMN provides a framework for designing and deploying workflows, enabling users to dynamically monitor workflow occurrences in detail, with activities highlighted as media moves through the chain. This means that operators do not need to know or worry about a specific task; when the Dalet AmberFin transcode platform receives a work order, it starts a process that describes the “recipe,” the ingredients and actions required to make the technical outputs. Users need only be concerned about the trigger and the result.

In the workflow designer, users are presented with a clear and simple “palette” of events, activities, gateways, and paths that use terms and graphics that are familiar to users with IT or media backgrounds. This common graphical language improves the communication and documentation of both the job requirements and the execution details.

Context-sensitive options and settings intuitively guide users through the process of joining workflow elements, with logical defaults and settings that speeds adding tasks such as “e-mail supervisor.” Workflow “success” paths are complemented by advanced exception handling, ensuring the highest degrees of automation while retaining the freedom to insert human judgment.

All this is combined with the latest Dalet AmberFin developments in standards and frame-rate conversion as well as international versioning and UHD capabilities, while leveraging all existing integrations with automated QC vendors and other tools.