Pharos | Solutions | Ingest and Upload

Pharos Mediator Ingest and Electronic File Delivery

Growth in the number and complexity of new channels means broadcasters are dealing with an ever increasing amount of content. Repurposing for new territories and new platforms such as on demand and mobile mean that optimal ingest workflow is more important than ever before, whilst re encoding for HD is also increasing third party infrastructure costs. Content is now arriving from multiple sources including Tape, Electronic File Delivery and Live Recordings and needs to be processed in the most efficient way possible to allow repurposing.

Pharos Mediator provides the most comprehensive toolset and workflow to manage content for ingest, editing, archive and distribution to broadcast and new media. Mediator modules for Library Management and QC are also integrated with Mediator ingest and upload capabilities to provide an even more streamlined approach to content handling.

Mediator can prioritise workflow to achieve optimal throughput of multi format content whilst also integrating best of breed third party technology for encoding and quality control.

Mediator delivers the following benefits for Ingest and Upload

Prioritise ingest workflows to increase throughput
Automatically confirm content integrity
Maximise use of third party technology
Minimise errors when handling multi-format media
Reduce media preparation time

Prioritise ingest workflows to increase throughput

Mediator makes ingest a unified process of accepting tapes or files into the workflow and ensures that all content goes through the same carefully defined processes.
Mediator's ingest process delivers material to the right place at the right time with maximum throughput. Data imported from traffic and scheduling systems is used by Mediator to more intelligently prioritise requests for ingest.

Mediator also intelligently prioritises ingest from tape in the most efficient order even though this may not necessarily be in transmission order. If several assets are present on the same tape they will all be ingested together. This reduces wear and tear on both the tape and the VTR.

With Mediator managing ingest, the process is vastly simplified and accelerated once the tapes have been loaded into a Flexicart or VTR directly. Tapes now only need to be viewed if an error occurs allowing ingest monitoring to be executed by exception, rather than by viewing all the content prior to or during ingest.

Automatically confirm content integrity

Mediator ingest workflows can be configured to automatically validate file type, file integrity and incoming audio profile.

Mediator Spot Check is used post ingest to quickly check the integrity of ingested content ensuring the right material can pass further into the workflow. This significantly reduces processing time. The Spot Check Task allows users to access and quickly verify material in TX priority order using a three point visual check.

Mediator provides a integrated browse resolution view for all digitised material, and high resolution material can viewed from a broadcast monitor. Operationally, users interact with browse or hi-res content using familiar VTR style controls. Comments and markers can be added frame accurately which remain as part of the content metadata for reference at any time.

Maximise the use of third party technology

To improve productivity during ingest, Mediator dynamically assigns VTRs to encoder ports at the point when they are queued and ready to play. This encoder pooling has two key benefits. Firstly, hardware encoders can be continually recording, maximising the utilisation of the hardware. Secondly, when working in a multi-format environment, different format VTRs can be auto routed, therefore reducing the required number of encoder ports.

Pharos Mediator includes the functionality to ingest using a wide range of technologies*
Flexicart with any VTR type including Sony eVTR and Digibeta
XDCAM and XDCAM HD
FTP file upload
A wide range of third party video encoders including Omneon and AmberFin iCR
Waveform monitors and rasterizers

Minimise errors when handling multi-format media

By unifying all HD and SD tape formats and all encoder types under a single control system, Mediator provides operators with a single familiar interface and secure process for all ingest operations. Where possible Mediator automates processes and accepts meta data from third party systems, thus eliminating manual data entry errors. Content can be re-wrapped between MXF and QuickTime as required at any stage of the workflow.

Each VTR is associated with a Pharos Barcode scanner so, the ingest process is simply a case of scanning the tape and loading it into the VTR.

Reduce media preparation time

Mediator manages each component of each asset individually, such as language track and subtitle track. When material arrives with multiple languages spread across more than one tape, these can be ingested simultaneously and Mediator takes care of consolidating these components automatically. These are then transferring for editing, TX and the archive as necessary.

Additional components such as subtitles and voiceovers can be added after ingest. These processes are managed by Mediator subtitle and voiceover workflows.