AmberFin Announces New Transcode Farm Controller & Network Licence Server for iCR

New enterprise-class features support business growth in a fluid file-based media landscape

Basingstoke, UK(04 Sep 2013)

At IBC 2013, on stand 7.H39, AmberFin, a leading developer of file-based media ingest, transcoding and quality control solutions for content owners, broadcasters, sports organizations and post-production houses will showcase new enterprise-class features for iCR, the company's file-based content ingest and transcoding system. 

Making its worldwide debut at IBC, the new iCR Transcode Farm Controller functionality builds on AmberFin’s market leading multi-format transcode capabilities. It significantly increases the flexibility and versatility of a multi-node transcode environment, bringing improved resilience and robustness whilst simultaneously bringing cost savings through more versatile network licensing capabilities.

The iCR platform makes intelligent use of a media facility’s resources, while making complicated workflows simple to operate for the end user. Visitors to the AmberFin stand will see how the iCR platform's enterprise class features can increase efficiency and profitability throughout a media facility's operation.

Transcode Farm Controller
In today’s increasingly file-based media workflows, file transcode operations have assumed critical importance. With media facilities both receiving and distributing content as media files, an efficient Transcode Farm Controller is essential. With the new iCR Transcode Farm Controller the transcode segment of the workflow is scalable, provides an appropriate level of redundancy to suit a specific application and enables a combination of high throughput and advanced system functionality.

The new iCR Transcode Farm Controller works by providing a single, reliable, redundant interface to the iCR Transcode capabilities. Jobs are sent to the iCR Controller and behind the scenes the system architecture is sized to achieve the required levels of redundancy and throughput required by that particular application. By combining the Farm Controller with AmberFin’s Network Licensing Server an even larger scale model can be created with pools of transcode nodes that can dynamically float across the underlying server hardware and no longer require fixed node-to-server relationships. This achieves even greater levels of redundancy and operational efficiency over a large-scale transcode network through efficient use of available hardware nodes, irrespective of node fall out at any given time.

The combination of the Transcode Farm Controller and Network License Server adds a third dimension in terms of enhanced network functionality. It provides floating software licenses for occasional functions, such as standards conversion, captioning, Dolby, audio processing and watermarking.

“The iCR platform has evolved with a very clear and tight focus on the business needs of our customers – it’s development is driven by modern enterprise operations which have changed greatly in recent years and will continue to do so in the future,” commented Bruce Devlin, Chief Technology Officer at AmberFin. “Employing the new iCR Transcode Farm Controller provides three dimensional scalability in terms of system redundancy, operational throughput and functionality in a highly efficient manner. In short, it empowers facilities with everything that a transcode farm needs to succeed in today’s fluid and dynamic business environment.”

Network License Server makes European debut at IBC
First introduced at NAB this year and making its European debut at IBC, AmberFin iCR's Network License Server enables facilities to use the same technology in both a single standalone Desktop PC running as the proof of concept as well as in a network of 100 or more servers / blades / VMs. Furthermore, each iCR node contains all the software required to implement the four main functions of media ingest, file transcode, playback and quality control. The license defines the functionality of a specific node at a specific time.

Another key feature of the Network License Server is its ability to ensure that a user’s full capacity is always on-line. For example, if one transcoder node encounters problems, the Farm Controller will seamlessly swap the required iCR operations to a back-up node and the Network License Server will ensure it is able to carry on. It is easy to tie together job queues and the Network License Server so that the network administrator is able to gauge how many jobs were delayed based on the licensing options available within the group. This feedback gives key capacity information to administrators, allowing them to manage both costs and capacity.

At IBC, AmberFin iCR also introduces new and sophisticated tools for adding, checking and inserting a user’s customer metadata through configuration and without requiring costly code customization. The iCR metadata plug-in wizard allows users to configure the metadata they need for their organization in such a way that ingest and QC operators can automatically update and validate this information as part of a QC workflow. This metadata can then be used to control segmentation workflows, versioning workflows and in simple wizards to perform the right process with the right media and right metadata at the right time.

For more information, please download the AmberFin white paper "Enterprise Level File-Based Workflows: Merging Technology with Sound Business Sense".  http://info.amberfin.com/whitepaper-enterprise

About AmberFin

AmberFin’s business is intelligent media conversion, solving file-based workflow challenges for broadcasters, sports organizations, post-production houses and other media content owners. Scalable, agile and efficient, the Amberfin iCR (intelligent Content Re-Purposing) Platform brings true innovation and cost-effectiveness to the demands of multi-platform delivery, enabling the industry to deal with high volumes and true-to-source high quality pictures at the same time, all with exclusive slim-file technology.

Unique to the iCR Platform, AmberFin’s industry leading approach to Quality Control, known as Unified Quality Control (UQC), introduces a QC mark that brings a new level of trust to media assets. UQC uniquely combines, automated processes that integrate third party verification tools with a human touch, enabling more efficient and effective decision-making and new levels of confidence in the file creation and transformation processes. AmberFin continues to experience market growth thanks to hundreds of iCR systems being deployed worldwide. Systems that are trusted where quality matters by some of the world’s leading media organizations including Sony Pictures, Warner Brothers, Turner Broadcasting, Canal+, ITV, ZDF, NRK, Nine Network Australia, Discovery and National Geographic. To follow the latest innovations in Broadcast-IT workflow technologies visit blog.amberfin.com