Volicon has released the biggest update yet to its Observer Enterprise video content logging and monitoring system, writes David Fox.
Version 6.0 simplifies critical processes with new loudness-monitoring capabilities, closed-caption support, and transport-stream monitoring and export, and is claimed to also serve as a convenient and versatile platform for additional monitoring applications.
“We’re continually refining our Observer product line to meet the evolving demands facing broadcast and media companies,” said Eli Warsawski, president and CEO at Volicon.
“While our Observer Enterprise system has always provided the reliable and straightforward monitoring capabilities our customers require, the 6.0 system release reflects significant advances that simplify compliance with new standards, regulations, and practices in the management and delivery of DTV services, and it opens opportunities to introduce new revenue-generating services.”
The Observer range captures, stores, and indexes broadcast content from multiple channels, offering users simultaneous 24/7 access to video from their desktop. Configurable alarms monitor video quality and provide early detection of audio and video issues across hundreds of HD channels, facilitating rapid resolution and minimizing downtime. The system also allows broadcasters to manage and compare content assets across multiple channels in a unified interface from any internet connection.
Observer Enterprise 6.0 now includes the same transport-stream logging capability as Observer TS (transport stream). This gives users the ability to handle MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 transport streams natively as high-resolution streams, or efficiently over the WAN as low-res proxies, while retaining the content and associated metadata within the stream. Users can mark in and out points, clip content, and then export a full programme and/or the full transport stream.
For compliance logging and air checks, the system can extract MPEG metadata and allow users to troubleshoot the MPEG transport stream live or from the Observer log. Because native transport-stream logging increases signal density and flexibility while enabling full-quality content logging, the system can be used to rebroadcast high-resolution data, provide interactive content, and offer dialnorm reporting for logged content.
Fully standards-compliant loudness monitoring has been added to enable realtime monitoring of broadcasts for regulatory compliance and to improve the listening experience for viewers. It has intuitive overlay controls and browser-based loudness monitoring for continuous measurement of programme loudness and true-peak signal levels for instant verification, review, or export. The new release also provides support for CEA-608/708 closed-captioning data within the transport stream.
