Olympics-tested Rough Cut Comes to Consumers

NBC's editing team in Vancouver found it a huge timesaver and now you can try it, too. The Silverlight Rough Cut Editor, which was first used by NBC Sports in February's Winter Games, is today being released to the public

The appealing thing about Rough Cut Editor is that it lets you create highlight clips instantly, straight from the browser interface. NBC used it alongside a live stream of the games to create event highlights, so that people just joining the coverage could get up to speed quickly.

"Two critical goals for coverage of the Vancouver Olympics were speed of delivery and cost," said Perkins Miller, senior vice president of Digital Media at NBC Sports. "The Silverlight Rough Cut Editor helped us achieve those goals by enabling editors to cut short-form highlights from long-form live coverage through a Web-based editor and have them published to the site within seconds - even while the event was still in progress. This dramatically reduced our costs and made it easier and faster to deliver video."

Rough Cut is a set of toolsets that sits on top of Silverlight's IIS Smooth Streaming delivery technology. As Silverlight gathers the rough video streams, it chunks the data for adaptive bitrate streaming. The Rough Cut Editor performs cuts on top of those chunks. Videos can then be reassembled immediately without the need for transcoding. Editors can work with live streams and viewers can see highlights that took place moments ago.

The product is available for free, so Silverlight users can download it and immediately integrate it into their workflow. Features include search and filtering, clip trimming, comment insertion, ad insertion, and metadata insertion.

Microsoft has been working on the editor for over six months, says Gabriele Di Piazza, managing director for the Media & Entertainment division, and wanted to test it in production with a major event before offering it to the public.

Microsoft is currently demoing Rough Cut Editor at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show in Las Vegas.

Troy Dreier's article first appeared on OnlineVideo.net