“With RadiantGrid’s TrueGrid transcoding capabilities, our customers can move their media workflows at faster speeds by simply adding more server capacity,” said Kirk Marple, president and chief software architect, RadiantGrid Technologies. “Customers can now execute fully-automated distribution to a variety of outlets since we offer both batch and grid-based processing.”

A key component of the RadiantGrid Platform is the combination of an underlying content management solution with integrated metadata indexing and quality analysis. RadiantGrid caches ingested source material and its metadata, which eliminates redundant and wasted processing time in content reuse scenarios. RadiantGrid leverages the same source asset without re-ingesting and learning the content again. This means that users can generate ProRes packages instantly for On-Air releases and pre-schedule distribution of their ProRes package release to iTunes for a later date and time.

“The RadiantGrid platform eliminates the need to pre-define the expected format of the source content, as often required by other transcoding solutions,” said Hank Frecon, managing director, RadiantGrid Solutions. “Through dynamic analysis, RadiantGrid decides the appropriate preparation process for ingested media, and auto-assigns transcoding parameters to provide the best quality output for our customers.”

RadiantGrid will be announcing more product features at NAB 2011, including solutions for integrated automation of corrective video and audio media processing.

About RadiantGrid Technologies:
RadiantGrid Technologies is an independent software vendor which develops and markets the RadiantGrid™ Platform – a leading-edge media workflow services platform targeting Broadcast & Cable Operators, Content Owners, Advertising Vendors, Digital Cinema Companies, and User-Generated Content Portals. The RadiantGrid Platform provides media transformation capabilities including grid-enabled transcoding, multi-format transcoding, multi-track assembly, standards conversion, and closed caption extraction and upconversion, in addition to metadata management, storage management, and media publishing.

PBS stations currently receive broadcast transmissions in real time via satellite. Elemental Server features faster-than-real-time video processing that RadiantGrid will leverage within the RadiantGrid TrueGrid™ transcoding solution component of the PBS NGIS Stations Services Platform to convert and deliver file-based broadcast content to 180 PBS licensees.  This combination of technology is one of the aspects that make it feasible for PBS to shift transmission of broadcast content to non-real-time.

“As PBS moves to a file-based delivery system, it is critical we maximize the efficiency of our distribution of broadcast content, ensure flexibility in our file formats and have sufficient processing power to make content available for our member stations,” said Jerry Butler, senior director of PBS Interconnection Replacement Office. “By adding Elemental’s accelerated video compression to its media delivery platform, RadiantGrid provides transcoded content reliably and efficiently in a package universally accessible across our network.”

Integrating Elemental Server technology with RadiantGrid in PBS’ edge servers will also provide a platform for the conversion of H.264 content to an MPEG-2 file format. Elemental Server uses graphics processors to perform the heavy lifting during the video encoding process, dramatically accelerating video conversion, reducing costs, and generating a higher return on investment from the broadcast delivery infrastructure.

“We are excited to work with RadiantGrid to implement our video compression engine in PBS stations across the country,” said Sam Blackman, CEO and chairman of Elemental Technologies.  “By transcoding source content in a parallel fashion using off-the-shelf hardware, Elemental Server software dramatically reduces the time and cost to generate the content PBS supplies its member stations.”

“RadiantGrid strives to harness the most powerful, efficient and reliable transcoding resources in our media delivery solutions,” said Kirk Marple, president and chief software architect of RadiantGrid Technologies.  “With the incorporation of Elemental’s GPU-accelerated transcoding technology into RadiantGrid’s TrueGrid transcoding architecture, customers will experience the joint benefits of faster-than-real-time performance by parallelizing the transcoding process across the GPU as well as across the cores of PBS NGIS Filestore.”

Forensic video watermarking for digital content that is pre-released can be a deterrent against content theft, and provides a forensic analysis tool in the event piracy does occur. Civolution’s NexGuard watermarking applications for pre-release content are deployed in content production and post-production facilities worldwide and add imperceptible video watermarks on a per content copy basis which are resilient to analog/digital conversion, format change, recompression and various other forms of content manipulation. The process adds a unique imperceptible serial number to each copy of a given piece of content and for any output format. NexGuard offers enhanced content security, whether copies of content go to post-production houses for dubbing, circulate for review or are delivered to distributors.

RadiantGrid will be providing a Watermark Management service within the RadiantGrid Platform, which will support the insertion of watermarks into content during the transcode phase using Civolution’s NexGuard solution. This service offered by RadiantGrid is based on a central watermark identifier repository.

“Users will benefit from the combined solution to deliver mezzanine files with identification of each distribution channel,” says Jean-Michel Masson, senior vice president, Watermarking Solutions, Civolution. “By offering the NexGuard forensic watermarking with one of the most efficient transcoding platforms available today, we can ensure that movie and television content right owners have an advanced protection solution for pre-release content.”

“Securing content prior to release is critical for the broadcast and film industries, especially with content being distributed in many different formats to various outlets where it can be hard to protect,” says Kirk Marple, president and chief software architect, RadiantGrid Technologies. “Civolution’s NexGuard watermarking solution offers state-of-the-art protection for premium content. We are pleased that we can offer this functionality for up to 10-bit depth images in all the output formats the RadiantGrid Platform supports, including JPEG2000 and AVC-Intra.”

These new watermarking capabilities by Civolution help RadiantGrid to further its goal to provide users with an end-to-end media workflow. Currently the company offers a fully-automated workflow from SDI signal ingestion through content preparation, quality control, and the company’s grid-enabled transcoding, which can offer faster than real-time speeds, out to digital distributors like iTunes or VOD including metadata publishing.

“The proliferation of our software expertise into many platforms is what our SDK and software was built for. We are excited to bring RadiantGrid into our family of growing partners and we look forward to expanding our future product sets into their unique grid-based transcoding architecture,” said Chris Gorman, CTO of Cinnafilm, Inc. “As clients of transcoding companies like RadiantGrid become more aware of bitrate-budget and how to maximize image quality within their budget, Cinnafilm’s effectiveness and adaptability become essential to delivering images that are both free of imperfections and can fulfill any format requirement.”

“The addition of Cinnafilm Dark Energy video processing to the RadiantGrid Platform is furthering our initiative to provide our users with the best tools to speed up their file-based workflows,” says Kirk Marple, president, chief software architect, RadiantGrid Technologies. “Since Cinnafilm’s video processing modules are GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) – based, they fit seamlessly into the RadiantGrid Platform. Dark Energy is able to perform grain and noise management, pulldown removal and frame rate conversion faster, much like our grid-based transcoding, and with better quality than other software out there in the market.”

RadiantGrid is able to provide these new capabilities due to a partnership with MOG Technologies. The company is offering its users MOG’s mxfSPEEDRAIL S1000 SDI Recorder as an integrated part of the platform’s infrastructure for live HD-SDI capture. By integrating the live capture recorder into the platform, once the recording of a file is complete, the RadiantGrid Platform will ingest the file and begin preparing it for transcoding.

RadiantGrid supports GPU-accelerated video preprocessing through its integration of the Cinnafilm Dark Energy® plug-in, and audio upmixing, downmixing, loudness range control and multi-pass scaling through the Linear Acoustic AERO.qc processor. Ingested files are immediately indexed for metadata, passed through an integrated Quality Control tool and then transcoded to different file formats via RadiantGrid.

“As a leader in the field when it comes to high-quality live capture, it only made sense to partner with MOG to bring these capabilities to the RadiantGrid Platform,” says Kirk Marple, president and chief software architect, RadiantGrid Technologies. “With the addition of live HD-SDI capture we are able to achieve a fully automated end-to-end workflow from record all the way to distribution.”

“RadiantGrid’s integration of mxfSPEEDRAIL demonstrates the strength and flexibility of this product to fulfill the goal to simplify workflows on service based platforms.” says Ricardo Oliveira, MOG Technologies Business Developer for North America. “This integration allows for speeding up production processes once it replaces one major step in the workflow: the need to have the file completely recorded to a different server and then ingested into the RadiantGrid Platform. Using MOG’s mxfSPEEDRAIL S1000, RadiantGrid is able to achieve a completely automated solution.”

MOG’s mxfSPEEDRAIL S1000 is a powerful and flexible multi-format SDI recording system. It has the ability to capture material directly into shared media storage, making it ready for editing, even during recording. The system is available in three or six channel versions and can write clips to multiple destinations simultaneously. The mxfSPEEDRAIL’s frame-accuracy and built-in VTR controller makes batch capturing tape assets simple.

Kirk Marple and Hank Frecon of RADIANTGRID TECHNOLOGIES, LLC. describe how transcoding has come a
long way from its new media origins, especially in broadcast and content production applications. These
days, media organizations must handle more formats across more platforms with fewer resources than
ever before. Managing these types of workflows requires transcoding solutions that offer high levels of
performance, reliability, efficiency, and quality. This paper attempts to detail these factors further, so that
readers can make an informed decision about the transcoding platform that will best fit their company’s
needs.

As one of the country’s largest broadcasters of English- and French-language pay and specialty television services, Astral operates, on its own or with partners, 20 television services, including The Movie Network/HBO Canada, Family Channel, Playhouse Disney Channel, Viewer’s Choice PPV. Processing such large amounts of content at Astral’s facilities required a means of converting files quickly and efficiently. RadiantGrid’s TrueGrid transcoding technology proved to be the perfect solution, allowing Astral Television to support multiple parallel workflows, which are used to convert the organization’s archive and production formats (GXF with Dolby E, Avid dnx, etc.) to a variety of different formats for the various file-based delivery chains.

“Online and VOD are becoming a normal part of the workflow for broadcasters like Astral, and as a result, they are going to require software able to handle the conversion for various, audio, video, closed captioning and associated metadata formats as quickly as possible,” explains Kirk Marple, president and chief software architect, RadiantGrid Technologies. “RadiantGrid prides itself in being able to offer its users the broadest range of file support available – making it an ideal choice for a situation such as this.”

RadiantGrid’s TrueGrid transcoding technology allows users to transcode files faster than other platforms. It accepts many media archive essence and ingestion container formats, including Avid DNxHD, Avid IMX50, MPEG-2 Long GOP, GXF and MXF Op-Atom and Op1a. From any of these container formats, RadiantGrid can deliver content to broadband, mobile, cable and broadcast formats and standards such as Microsoft Silverlight (VC-1), H.264, CableLabs 1.1 MPEG-2, QuickTime DVCPRO-HD, Flash On2 VP6, 3GPP and the Apple iPhone.

In addition to offering decoding support, Astral also has plans to add RadiantGrid’s GXF and Dolby E encoding options to its workflow so that the company will be able to convert files to GXF and Dolby E formats directly from post for on-air playback from Grass Valley K2 video servers. Also on the audio front, Astral plans to implement the Linear Acoustic module for Radiant Grid, which will provide a full range of file-based audio processing, such as dialnorm/compression profile adjustment and upmix/downmix.

Originally developed by Grass Valley and SMPTE, GXF (SMPTE 360M) files allow for the transfer and archiving of HD Video content throughout a file-based workflow and can be used with Grass Valley K2 Summit™ and K2 Solo™ servers as well as legacy products. Through their work with MOG Solutions, RadiantGrid will now be able to offer its users full support for closed captioning and AFD (Active Format Description) data within GXF files, for those users looking to work with GXF files throughout their workflow. Being one of the only transcoding software developers on the market to offer GXF VANC (vertical ancillary data) and AFD support, RadiantGrid users will now be able to have all transcoding processes performed within one platform.

“RadiantGrid aims to have the broadest range of support for closed captioning and ancillary data in the industry today, across the widest number of formats and the widest range of video servers,” explains Kirk Marple, president, chief software architect, RadiantGrid Technologies. “With Grass Valley’s GXF being such an industry standard and customers requesting support of VANC within GXF for use with their Grass Valley media servers, it was important for us to be able to offer these capabilities within our transcoding platform. This addition allows users to not only transcode from GXF file formats, but convert files to GXF using RadiantGrid’s TrueGrid™ faster than real time transcoding.”

MOG was selected to include the GXF VANC multiplexing support that RadiantGrid required as it is one of the only companies to have developed a licensable GXF Software Development Kit (SDK) on the market. This helped to streamline the incorporation of GXF transcoding into the RadiantGrid Platform.

“MOG Solutions shares RadiantGrid’s goal of helping to increase productivity in file-based workflows, so working together to implement closed captioning and data GXF support into the company’s platform was an important and innovative project to participate in, proving MOG’s know-how and experience as a world supplier of GXF development tools.” says Vitor Teixeira, Sales and Marketing Director, MOG Solutions.

“We are happy to have worked with RadiantGrid to offer GXF support within the company’s transcoding platform,” says Tim Slate, director of product development at Grass Valley. “Along with GXF, our servers also support a broad range of file formats including MXF Op1a, QuickTime, and soon to be released support for AMWA AS-03 MXF. With the implementation of GXF support into the RadiantGrid Platform, users will have their choice of formats to work in when utilizing Grass Valley servers as part of their workflow.”

Scheduled for Thursday, April 8, at 11:30 a.m. in the MGM Grand hotel, the joint presentation will describe the two companies’ research into the benefits and ROI of applying SSD (solid-state disk), SATA, and SAS storage technologies to grid transcoding. Aine and Marple also will outline a set of best practices developed to guide deployment of transient, ingest, and archival media on the most appropriate storage technologies while meeting the bandwidth needs of grid transcoding.

“Transcoding and media workflow technologies are typically deployed on commodity hardware, networking, and storage infrastructures,” said Aine. “However, because of the high parallelization of the grid transcoding approach, standard networking and storage infrastructures cannot support the cumulative bandwidth requirements of the transcoding processes. Our aim with this presentation is to illuminate how select storage technologies can be leveraged by content owners and producers to support intensive grid-based processing — and their attendant bandwidth requirements — within highly efficient media workflows.”

With more than 20 years in the industry, Aine is an expert in the design, development, and delivery of high-performance storage area networks (SANs), distributed file systems, and other advanced storage and processing solutions for the broadcast and media industries. Prior to founding SAN Solutions, he served as product manager and business development manager at MountainGate, creating the CentraVision™ product line that eventually became Quantum®’s StorNext®.

Marple has more than 20 years of experience in the software industry. He currently is responsible for the RadiantGrid™ Platform’s vision, strategic business development, and product development. He earlier was a co-founder and chief software architect at Agnostic Media.

Information about systems from SAN Solutions is available at http://www.sansolutions.com, and information about RadiantGrid solutions is available at http://www.radiantgrid.com.

As a sub-project of PBS’ Next Generation Interconnection System (NGIS), the Non-Real-Time Program File Delivery Project (NGIS-NRT) will allow member stations to receive programs as files. Currently, stations are receiving programming in real time via satellite. In 2010, PBS is beginning a phased roll-out of its NGIS-NRT system to approximately 180 licensees.

Due to the variation in video servers at the stations, PBS requires a means to convert the file delivered by the NGIS-NRT for each station’s server file format. The RadiantGrid™ Platform was selected to handle these conversions.

“NGIS-NRT will help to provide a delivery format to our member stations that is efficient, reliable and flexible,” explains Jerry Butler, senior director, PBS Interconnection Replacement Office. “With each station being an independent entity, and using a variety of equipment, we required a means of ensuring that our file formats were able to play anywhere. RadiantGrid transcoding software has been in use in the PBS Media Operations Center for some time, so it was logical to extend the use of the platform to the NGIS-NRT Project. As part of the total NGIS-NRT System, the RadiantGrid Platform will assure that all stations are able to use the program files that are delivered to them. Their ability to handle Closed Captions was particularly important to our project.”

“When in full production, we expect that the NGIS-NRT System will transmit approximately 40 hours of programming in each 24-hour day,” Butler continues. “Therefore, it is vital that the transcoding engine work faster than real-time in order for stations to have usable files at their locations in time for air. The RadiantGrid Platform’s TrueGrid technology is able to transcode faster than real time, ensuring that our stations will be able to make their deadlines.”

“Our TrueGrid™ transcoding is a great fit for a file-based broadcast workflow such as PBS’ NGIS-NRT System because source content can be transcoded in parallel across all available transcoding resources,” explains Kirk Marple, president, chief software architect, RadiantGrid Technologies. “This offers a quicker means to transcode files while also offering better utilization of the transcoding resources.”

Along with handling transcoding of files, the RadiantGrid Platform has an extended Closed Caption Management layer. The company’s Closed Captioning Management Module can handle a variety of closed captioning formats including SMPTE 436M, SMPTE 360M within VANC data in a GXF container, ATSC EIA-608 and EIA-708 within user data in an MPEG-2 program stream, ATSC EIA-608 and EIA-708 within VANC data in an MPEG-2 transport stream, bitmapped VBI data in the visible video stream, SMPTE 2016 (AFD, Bar Data), CGMS-A, XDS, or reading or writing SAMI and SCC textual formats. This system provides both the capability to extract closed captioning from media sources, and to insert closed captioning back into the transcoded output file.