Digital Nirvana aims for metadata creation bliss with MetadatorIQ

Optimised for Avid MediaCentral | Production Management assets, MetadatorIQ is described as a hybrid on-premises/SaaS application that applies advanced machine learning and AI-based content analysis to accelerate metadata creation and shorten content delivery cycles.

Russell Wise, senior vice president at Digital Nirvana, said: “Media companies are challenged like never before to create larger volumes of personalised content and then deliver it to targeted audiences across many dispersed channels. The key to creating, finding, understanding, and organising new content as fast as possible is highly descriptive metadata, but until now its creation has been a manual, time-consuming, and costly process.

“As the newest member of our IQ family of AI-driven media services, MetadatorIQ leverages powerful video intelligence features for automatic generation of better-structured, more detailed, and more accurate metadata,” added Wise. “Media operations benefit in two ways – first, with tremendous time savings in up-front metadata generation, and then by giving producers the ability to zero in on the assets they need right away. Ultimately, they win with accelerated content delivery and the ability to retain larger audiences of satisfied viewers.”

MetadatorIQ automates the end-to-end process of creating transcriptions and video-based metadata for Avid-based media assets. The solution automatically transfers content assets from Avid MediaCentral and then applies video intelligence tools such as speech-to-text generation, logo and facial recognition, object identification, and shot-change identification to generate descriptive metadata. Next, MetadatorIQ ingests assets and their time-coded metadata back into Avid, along with markers that make the assets instantly searchable. Editors are said to be able to access raw footage quickly and effortlessly, and they can retrieve relevant content from the archive for easy repurposing.

As a hybrid solution, MetadatorIQ is installed on premises for maximum security and runs on either a dedicated server or a virtual machine. The application automatically extracts the original asset from the Avid watch folder and creates a low-res proxy or audio-only version, which is then securely transferred to the cloud for automatic metadata generation. Next, the metadata is returned to the on-premises application and ingested back into Avid MediaCentral with locators.

“Security is always an important consideration with any cloud SaaS application. MetadatorIQ protects valuable assets by moving the low-res proxy files to encrypted storage in the cloud, and the proxies are then erased once the job is processed,” Wise said. “All transfers to and from the cloud are over TLS-encrypted HTTP. The processed metadata is delivered back to the MetadatorIQ application living within the customer’s premises, where it’s converted into the formats based on customer requirements.”