Quasar - Video Quality Control Software | Cloud Video QC Solution | Venera Technologies

 

Introduction

The cloud platform provides immense flexibility and speed in the rapidly changing business environment. Media companies worldwide are either using the cloud or are in the process of migrating to the cloud to manage their content workflows.

A typical content workflow involves a set of cohesive solutions working seamlessly together. To take advantage of cloud capabilities, you need to ensure that all the solutions are cloud-native, as opposed to static monolithic systems. That is where Quasar® comes in. Quasar® is a native cloud file QC service based on microservices architecture.

It offers immense scalability and flexibility to automate your content QC operations on the cloud, along with some of these key capabilities:-

1. Dynamic scaling
2. Auto regional resourcing
3. Security
4. Reliability
5. Usage-based pricing
6. SaaS services

With auto-scaling, you no longer have to worry about waiting for your content to get processed in a queue. Whether you have a few files or a few hundred files, Quasar® can automatically spin up virtual machines quickly and process all of your content in parallel without waiting. It has the capability to process thousands of media files simultaneously.

Additionally, Quasar® also automatically ensures that the virtual machines are provisioned in the same region as the content, essentially eliminating latency as well as the egress charges you may otherwise incur.

Content security is another area that is given plenty of attention and importance in the Quasar® architecture. With the support of advanced content access mechanisms, we ensure that users don’t have to share their storage credentials with Quasar®. We also ensure that the content remains encrypted during the content transfer and processing on the temporary virtual machine. Combining that with our strict operational policies on managing the Quasar® service, we ensure that we adhere to the highest standards of security and reliability that are expected of a native cloud QC service.

Our comprehensive monitoring systems keep an eye on the service status at all times, updating our support team about the health of the system. We also have redundancy and disaster recovery processes in place to ensure uninterrupted service to our customers, just in case of rare cloud infrastructure failures.

Quasar® is offered on a pay-per-use basis with our range of monthly or annual subscription plans based on your content volume. For users with limited or infrequent content volume, we also offer Quasar® on an ad-hoc usage basis, first in the industry where the user can pay based on their usage without needing to commit to any monthly or annual subscription plans.

We offer Quasar® as a SaaS service, wherein the entire service and infrastructure are managed by us. To get your QC done, you just need to either log in to your Quasar® account and submit your QC jobs manually or call the Quasar® REST API as part of Quasar®’s integration into a workflow. This completely relieves you and your team of having to manage the service and leads to significant time and cost savings.

Nevertheless, if you still need Quasar® to run within your own virtual private cloud, we offer Quasar® as a private edition too.

Quasar® can help you accept or deliver compliant and high-quality content quickly and efficiently. With a wide range of QC checks, support for the latest video and audio technologies and formats, fast QC performance, and a range of free factory templates, you can go a long way in improving the efficiency of your content workflows.

Contact us today and ask for our Quasar® free trial so that you can see for yourself the benefits of using Quasar® for validating your media content. You’ll be happy you did.

Automated Video QC | Quasar - QC on Cloud | Venera Technologies

Quasar is a powerful Cloud QC software optimized to work with multiple cloud platforms including Amazon Web Services…

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About Venera Technologies

Venera Technologies provides cutting-edge file-based QC solutions to the digital media industry, tailored to the evolving requirements of its customer and the industry. Venera’s mission is to improve the operational efficiency of professional content workflows by helping automate the time-consuming, tedious content QC operations. Venera’s suite of QC solutions is used by some of the largest Media companies in the world, as well as a number of smaller boutique post houses and production companies.

Venera Business Overview - Automated QC Solutions For Video, Audio, Captions and Subtitles

 

Introduction

Venera Technologies provides cutting-edge file-based QC solutions to the digital media industry, tailored to the evolving requirements of its customers and the industry. Venera’s Quasar® the first native cloud-based QC solution, was developed natively for the Cloud environment with features such as dynamic scalability and a usage-based pricing model, along with advanced QC functionalities. Venera’s Pulsar™ automated file-based QC solution is for on-premise deployment, with the same QC functionalities as Quasar. CapMate™, the native cloud Caption/Subtitle verification, and correction solution is the first comprehensive solution for verifying caption or subtitle sidecar files that can accurately and quickly detect (and correct) and report on complex issues such as caption sync and Standards compliance. Venera’s suite of QC solutions is used by some of the largest Media companies in the world, as well as a number of smaller boutique post houses and production companies.

Learn more: https://www.veneratech.com/

Follow us: Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/VeneraTechnologies/

LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/company/venera-technologies/?viewAsMember=true

Twitter — https://twitter.com/veneratech

About Venera Technologies:

Venera Technologies provides cutting-edge file-based QC solutions to the digital media industry, tailored to the evolving requirements of its customers and the industry. Venera’s mission is to improve the operational efficiency of professional content workflows by helping automate time-consuming, tedious content QC operations. Venera’s suite of QC solutions is used by some of the largest Media companies in the world, as well as a number of smaller boutique post houses and production companies.

Originally Published At:- https://youtu.be/ujmeHwf9byY

CapMate® — Cloud Native Caption/Subtitle QC

 

Introduction

Delivering good quality captions or subtitles can be very costly due to significant manual intervention required in identifying and rectifying a variety of issues with traditional captioning software. This becomes more difficult especially when different customers have different technical and quality requirements. Operators end up spending numerous hours and sometimes days dealing with this. If the Caption or Subtitle QC is neglected and not done properly, then this can pose serious brand risk in the current environment where viewers expect highest quality of experience.

CapMate® — Captions QC & Correction platform changes all that. It automatically identifies issues and allows users to perform auto correction and export the rectified captions right from within the platform. This saves significant time & cost for the organizations and allow them to deploy their resources in more value-added tasks.

Features & Benefits

1. Compliance

Rich QC features of CapMate ensure that the captions/subtitles of your content are compliant with corresponding specifications like SCC, IMSC, TTML, etc. You can further validate the captions/subtitles for major content delivery platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Viacom-CBS and others.

2. Caption-Audio Sync

CapMate allows to automatically identify and correct the sync issues between audio and captions in the content, which can be further reviewed. Rich manual correction and adjustment capabilities are provided for fine control on captions and subtitles.

3. Burnt-in-text overlap

CapMate automatically identifies all the overlap locations of burnt-in text and captions/subtitles, and allows to take corrective measures so that all important information is clearly visible to the viewers.

4. Timing Issues

CapMate can identify and rectify the timing issues of the captions, such as display duration of the caption, number of characters displayed in a line, number of words displayed in a minute, and time gap between two successive captions.

5. Profanity

With CapMate, you can easily identify abusive/curse words in the captions/subtitles and replace them with words of your choice. Corrected caption files can be further exported.

6. Missing Captions

CapMate can automatically identify missing captions in the portion of a movie or a TV show, help you insert the missing caption, and export the rectified file.

7. Review

CapMate is equipped with rich browser-based review and correction system, allowing users to navigate and preview caption QC results with associated audio/video, manually correct the caption timing, text, and styling, and export the corrected.

Technical specifications

CapMate supports a wide range of caption/subtitle formats. It also allows a wide range of checks on caption and subtitle assets.

1. Formats

Input: SRT, SCC, IMSC, TTML, DXFP, SMPTE-TT

Export: All the above formats supported. Export in same format as the input.

2. Analysis

Text: No. of lines, Line length, Caption position, Profane words, Spell check, Missing translation

Timing: CPS, CPL, WPM, Min/Max Duration, Frame gap

Text/Video: Caption overlap on burnt-in text

Text/Audio: Caption/Audio synchronization, Missing Captions, Supported Languages: English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portuguese

Compliance: SCC, IMSC, TTML, DXFP, SMPTE-TT, WebVTT and EbuSTL

Parameters: HDR Formats, Reporting of HDR10, HDR10+, and Dolby Vision metadata

Spotting: Video segments containing burnt-in text

3. Editing

·      Captions text editing

·      Captions timing: sync, CPS, duration, caption gaps

·      Caption position

·      Text find & replace

·      Automatic sync correction

·      Conversion from Upper case to mixed case

4. Review

·      Proxy creation

·      Proxy download and assignment for review

·      Reporting and navigation of all frames with burnt-in text

·      Filter based error navigation to allow working on specific type of errors

Originally Published at:- https://www.veneratech.com/capmate/

Automated detection of Mosquito Tone in media content

Introduction

Mosquito Tone! Does this give the impression that it has something to do with mosquitos?

Well, it does relate to tones with the buzzing sounds similar to the noise made by a mosquito but it is not directly related to ultra-sonic mosquito repellant devices in any way.

Humans can hear the sounds between frequencies of 20 Hz to 20 KHz.

Mosquito tones are high-frequency tones, normally above 17 KHz.

These tones are inaudible by adults but can be heard by teenagers. Yes, you read it correctly! Teenagers can hear mosquito tones but adults cannot. That is because it is normal for people to lose their hearing as they age and as a result, they are unable to hear the higher frequency sounds. With age, the audible audio frequency range continue to narrow down with losses towards the high frequency. The actual audible range can vary across individuals who are similar in age.

While there are both desired and undesired uses of mosquito tone in various applications, presence of mosquito tone is generally not acceptable in the media content delivered by various content delivery services. Presence of mosquito tones can cause severe degradation in user experience for the younger population. Infants & toddlers hearing systems can be severely impacted by the presence of such tones as the adults will not even notice their presence while unknowingly exposing kids to them for an extended period of time.

It is therefore important for content providers to ensure mosquito tones are not present in the delivered content. This is where the challenge comes in.

Most of the QC operators working with content providers are adults and as a result will inevitably miss the mosquito tone even if it is present in the content. So, performing a full manual QC of the audio is certainly not sufficient to detect this. Missing such signals can prove to be very expensive for content providers in terms of increased churn as well as related legal liability, as this could be potentially harmful to the public health. In case of delivery mediums like television, the negative effect could be very wide-spread due to the inherent broadcast nature of the delivery medium.

Therefore, since it is clear that manual QC for detection of these tones will not work, using a QC tool that can performance a reliable detection of mosquito tones is necessary.

Venera’s QC tools – Quasar & Pulsar, perform audio spectrum analysis and can reliably report the presence of mosquito tones in the content. Users have the flexibility to define the frequency range for these tones, and all the mosquito tones in that range will be reliably reported for user’s review. Moreover, all such tones can be detected in an automated manner, thereby improving the workflow efficiencies significantly while saving content providers from any claims downstream. 

Visit www.veneratech.com/pulsar to read more about Pulsar™ and request a free trial.

Visit www.veneratech.com/quasar to read more about Quasar® and request a free trial.

Originally Published at:- https://www.veneratech.com/automated-detection-mosquito-tone-in-media-content/

Caption/Subtitle QC vs. Authoring

 

Introduction

The presence of captions and subtitles with digital media files has become more prominent and nearly universal. We often see content creators and distributors contemplate the difference between a Caption Authoring system and a Caption/Subtitle QC system and whether they are both needed. So, we thought it is worthwhile to clarify and differentiate the role each software category provides.

Caption/Subtitle Authoring and Caption/Subtitle QC remain two separate and distinct activities. While caption authoring is used to create captions and subtitles, caption QC is an increasingly important part of any caption/subtitle workflow in order to ensure the optimum end-user experience when viewing captions. The caption QC until recently, had remained a time-consuming and resource intensive manual process. The advent of advanced and automated caption QC software, such as CapMate from Venera Technologies, is now providing a logical alternative to the tedious manual caption QC process, allowing automation of a large portion of this process.

To further clarify and differentiate between caption authoring tools and caption QC tools, we will examine some scenarios to help you appreciate the importance of specialized caption QC systems.

 

Caption/Subtitle Creation

A common authoring system will let you generate raw captions using ASR (Automated Speech Recognition) technology that provides the first draft of the captions. An operator is required to then add the captions missed by the ASR technology and properly align/format all the captions as needed. Authoring systems may provide basic measurements such as CPS (Characters Per Second), WPM (Words Per Minutes) and CPL (Characters Per Line) that will allow you to rectify the basic ‘timing’ issues. Since the raw captions are generated by the tool itself, they are expected to be aligned with the converted audio. However, the responsibility of aligning any new captions you add lies with you. Authoring tools probably can not provide any analysis capabilities for sync issues on the user added segments. Another common requirement is to ensure that the captions are not placed on top of burnt-in text in the video. Again, you will have to manually ensure that no such overlapping sections exist in the video and an operator will have to watch the entire video content in order to ensure this. The full review of the caption/video is similarly required for many other common issues.

So, while an authoring system allows you to create, edit and format your captions efficiently, it usually doesn’t provide rich analysis capabilities to QC the captions. The responsibility of detecting basic issues and correcting them lies with you.

 

Caption/Subtitle Compliance

Let’s take this a step further. In today’s world, ensuring the basic sanity of captions is not enough. Every major broadcaster or OTT service provider or educational content provider has its own technical specifications for the captions it requires. There can be many such requirements, a few of which are as follows:-

– Max number of lines of caption per screen.

– Minimum and Maximum duration of each caption.

– Captions sync aligned with audio to a maximum specified sub-second threshold.

– All captions to be placed at the bottom third of the screen, while avoiding burnt-in text overlay. In case of overlap, another position may be used.

– Detection of profanity (words defined by the user to be unacceptable)

– Spelling checks.

 

Caption/Subtitle Editing

So far, we have discussed only the Caption creation scenario. However, a lot of times, an existing caption file needs to be repurposed because of editing in the audio-visual content. Such changes can include the addition of certain video segments, removal of segments, changing caption location based on customer guidelines, or frame rate changes. We have encountered many cases where the customers have been trying to use the original captions with such edited content, which leads to a lot of issues. Detecting and correcting such issues manually can be time-consuming and resource intensive. Since authoring tools do not usually provide auto-analysis capabilities, they can’t help with the detection of such issues. The only way you can use caption authoring systems in this case is to use their user interface and detect/correct such issues manually.

Any compromise in this manual process will lead to missed issues in the content delivered to the customers/content owner. This will effectively mean multiple iterations, causing further delays and affecting customer satisfaction before the captions are accepted by the customer.

This is where the caption QC tools come in. Caption QC systems address these issues head-on by performing auto-detection (and in case of advanced systems like CapMate, auto-correction) for a wide-range of caption issues. With configurable QC templates, you can set up the checks you needed, define the acceptable thresholds, and let the system do its job. Since the aim of such systems is the analysis, the entire interface is designed to make the analysis and spotting quick & efficient. You only need to act upon the issues reported by the caption QC system. An intelligent caption QC system such as CapMate also provides features to automatically correct many of the issues found, as well as a rich review/editing tool, using which you can easily browse through the reported issues and make the appropriate manual corrections efficiently. They no longer need to watch the entire content.

 

 

Not using captions QC tools means that the responsibility of detecting and correcting all captions issues lies with you, which is time-consuming and resource intensive, not to mention error-prone.

While it is understood that the concept of ‘Automated Captions QC & Correction’ is relatively new but adopting such a system can lead to significant business benefits. Our customers who have adopted the use of CapMate into their workflow are benefiting from the efficiencies gained in their caption QC operations from the insights provided by the tool along with its auto-correction abilities.

 

Conclusion

Caption QC and Caption Authoring tools serve different and complimentary purposes in the caption workflow operation and do their respective jobs in an excellent manner. While Caption QC tools are not intended for caption authoring, Caption Authoring tools are also not well-suited, nor are they intended, for efficient caption QC process. Using both tools judiciously in a workflow can lead to higher quality caption deliveries with more efficient use of the experienced QC operators.

 

About CapMate

CapMate™ is a Cloud Native SaaS service for Captions/Subtitles QC and Correction. Whether you are a Captioning service provider, OTT service provider, Broadcaster or a Captioning platform, CapMate can significantly improve your workflow efficiency with its automatic analysis, rich review, spotting, and correction capabilities. Once completed, you can export the finished captions for direct use in production.

Get in touch with us today and we would love to discuss with you how we can help you solve your content QC challenges efficiently.

Originally Published at:- https://www.veneratech.com/caption-subtitle-qc-vs-authoring/

QCaaS™ – QC as a Service

 

Introduction

QCaaS means QC as a Service. The service is designed for organizations who simply want to supply their content for QC and get the QC done using Pulsar/Quasar file QC systems. This allows organizations to focus on their core business and leave the template setup and QC to us.

How does QCaaS work?

Following is the process for QCaaS:-

Features & Benefits

1.  No software management

QCaaS is a service offered by us wherein you don’t need to setup any software in your infrastructure. You just submit the content to us and we will deliver QC reports to you.

2. No long-term commitment

QcaaS is offered as a file-based QC service that doesn’t require any long-term commitment on the part of the client. You can just submit a fixed number of files for QC and get QC reports from us.

3. Secure and efficient

A special S3 bucket is assigned to you for uploading the content for QC. This bucket is specific to you and the submitted content is deleted immediately after QC reports are submitted. No content back-up is kept with us, making it a secure service.

4. Usage based pricing

QCaaS is a pay-as-you-go service and you pay only for what you use. So, you need not burn a hole in your pocket by investing in a QC tool if you only have sporadic requirements.

Originally published at:- https://www.veneratech.com/qcaas/

Media Offline: What is it and how to deal with it?

 

Media offline is a term used to describe the situation where a portion of a content is inaccessible or cannot be played due to a technical error, a missing media segment, or other reasons.

How does this happen?

One of the most important steps during the post-production process for a content is ‘Editing’. A typical editing project comprises many media clips and segments that are stitched together in the timeline, in order to create the complete content. A professional editing solution keeps references to all these segments and allows publishing of the final render once the editing process is completed. These media segments can reside in various storage such as SD-Card, SAN, NAS, USB, HDD, etc.

Imagine a scenario where a fresh piece of content is received on an SD card. The editor inserts this SD card into the Editing software and adds the media files on the SD card on to the editing timeline. It looks all good at preview and the editor saves the project. The editor comes the next day, removes the SD card while continuing to work on the editing project. On previewing the file, the editor suddenly sees “Media Offline” image in the video. This “Media offline” image is inserted by the Editing solution when the referenced media is not accessible due to the removal of the SD card. This can also happen if a media file is deleted, moved, renamed or simply becomes inaccessible in a network storage. It can also happen due to slow access to the storage. The actual “Media Offline” image also varies across different editing solutions.

Here are some examples:-

Unfortunately, human mistakes & network issues continue to happen in the editing environment and therefore, such a scenario is common. However, the presence of “Media Offline” segments in the final content delivered out of the post-production process is completely unacceptable. Its presence will lead to content rejection, thereby damaging the reputation of the post-production house. If the issue is detected in time before delivery, rectification is fairly easy as it is only a matter of providing correct reference to the missing media file inside the editing solution.

How to rectify “Media Offline”?

Comprehensive rectification requires timely & accurate detection of “Media offline” issues in the content. There are two ways of detecting media offline: manual and automated.

Manual Method to Detect Media Offline

The manual method involves an operator manually checking the content to determine if the “Media Offline” image is present in the content. The image can be present for a few frames or for a longer duration, depending on the length of missing content. This will require an operator to watch through the entire content, which can be a time-consuming process and is prone to human errors.

Automated Method to Detect Media Offline

An Automated QC solution can detect “Media offline” in the content without any manual intervention. An operator just needs to configure the template in the video QC software and the rest is done automatically. This test by the video quality checker software is also accurate and therefore, can be relied upon without a need for a manual scan. Using an Automated File QC solution for this detection is faster and more efficient than manual methods, thereby helping optimize the content workflows.

 

Pros and Cons of Manual and Automatic Methods

There are hardly any cons of using Automated methods, as the investment in QC software is easily offset by the cost savings by eliminating manual intervention.

Venera offers a wide range of Automated QC solutions – both for on-premise (Pulsar) and Cloud deployment (Quasar).

Quasar & Pulsar are perfect solutions for automated media offline detection, allowing you to detect and fix media offline issues quickly and efficiently. This helps minimize the impact of such QC issues on production timelines and budgets while retaining the reputation of the post-production company.

By relying on Quasar & Pulsar, post-production houses can be certain that content delivered by them to their customers is free of “Media Offline” issues.

Venera’s QC solutions are also highly customizable, allowing users to configure them to their specific needs and requirements. Users can choose to invest upfront in a QC software license or can pay on a usage basis. With these options available, using a QC solution to detect and eliminate Media Offline issues efficiently is easy & feasible for everyone.

We hope this article has been informative and helpful in understanding media offline and its implications on media production. We would love to hear about your experiences and tips for dealing with media offline. Please share your thoughts and recommendations in the comments section below.

Originally Published at:- https://www.veneratech.com/