Amber Fin’s Unified Quality Control hits London facility

Amber Fin’s Unified Quality Control features and functionality have been integrated at  London-based broadcast facility, TVT as the  facility is contributing to on-going beta testing of the Amber Fin file-based quality control system.

Established in 1994, TVT offers versioning, localisation and media supply services: in 2008, it built a pioneering end-to-end file based facility which hosts edit suites, audio suites, ingest, dubbing, transcode, delivery and storage facilities. This new facility operates within a tapeless, file-based production environment and this is where AmberFin’s iCR file-based media ingest and transcoding solution adds most value to TVT’s operations.

UQC offers a unique approach to quality control combining multiple tools for baseband checks during tape ingest, file-based QC after ingest, and overall operator-controlled QC, including annotation and mark-up. TVT’s managing director, Kim Thesiger, believes that UQC delivers the promise of significant new efficiencies for facilities like his.

“Like all companies, we are starting to receive a significant percentage of master material as files rather than tapes, so having a reliable, easy to use file QC solution is extremely important. Having a unified interface for tape and file QC is also important from a training perspective. Finally, we’re also planning to use AmberFin to auto-QC outgoing Playout and VoD files to ensure that transcoding glitches and file copy errors are caught before the file reaches the client.”

TVT sees AmberFin core value coming from it being an integrated solution, capable of producing high quality product with a good user interface that technicians find straightforward and intuitive.

“Like any media factory, efficiency is a key requirement for us,” commented Thesiger. “We integrate AmberFin throughout our operations and it creates significantly increased efficiency in our operations. Our aim is to streamline our entire workflow so we have gone even further and automated ingest operations using iCR. We are very happy to contribute to the system’s development and evolution as this will benefit us as much as the entire industry.”

AmberFin believes that the active participation of companies such as TVT is invaluable in developing its system’s capabilities. “We rely heavily on customer feedback in developing iCR’s functionality and TVT is one of our longest standing and most progressive customers so we are delighted to have them assist us in fine tuning UQC’s operating features,” comments Bruce Devlin, Chief Technology Officer at AmberFin. “Brainstorming with the folks of TVT has allowed us to refine the capabilities of the UQC system to deliver great business value to customers ready to buy at IBC.”