IBC2012: Telestream Scores IBC Innovation Award for NASCAR High-Speed Officiating System

While Telestream’s booth at IBC2012 is chock full of new and enhanced products making their European debuts, the biggest story of the company’s show came on Sunday evening, when the high-speed officiating system it helped to develop for NASCAR took home an Innovation Award in the Content Management category.

“We are obviously very excited about it,” says Telestream VP of Marketing Barbara DeHart. “[The system] means that you can have your officials working and communicating from anywhere all tied together. We are also helping to deploy this workflow in collegiate and professional football. It’s obviously very targeted at sports, but there are a lot of applications outside of sports as well, like security.”

Video Capture and Instant Replay
Telestream teamed with NASCAR, Quantum, and CineSys to design a video-capture and replay system that allowed NASCAR race officials to instantly access replays from 18 trackside HD cameras in order to make penalty judgments on incidents and accidents.

The race-control system is based on Telestream’s Pipeline HD hardware encoder and a new multiclip Pipeline Replay application. The scalable, file-based system provides instant capture and synchronous display of the 18 HD camera feeds, enabling instant access, search, and analysis of an entire race event. Quantum’s StorNext data-management software and CineSys’s disc storage also contributed to the system.

The race-control system uses high-speed StorNext File System software from Quantum to provide simultaneous access of video content, including the ability to rewind and read while continuing to write from 18 HD cameras. CineSys provided on-site infrastructure, architecture, installation, and technical assistance.

Vantage 4.0 Ready To Roll
Telestream also took the opportunity at IBC2012 to announce that version 4.0 of its Vantage video-transcoding and workflow-automation products is shipping. Unveiled at the NAB Show in April, the revamped Vantage is targeted squarely at the multiscreen market and relies on a new GPU-accelerated Lightspeed Server for fast video processing and H.264 encoding. Transcode Multiscreen accelerates multi-bitrate H.264 transcoding and packaging for multiscreen video delivery, including OTT, tablets, and mobile devices.

“Vantage 4.0 is very targeted at ground-up development for transcoding to address multiscreen and H.264 deployments,” says DeHart. “In addition, we have significantly beefed up the whole workflow-design capability of Vantage. One of the challenges regarding Vantage is, when people use it for workflow, they often don’t realize its transcoding power. Then, when people use Vantage for transcode, they sometimes don’t realize there is this amazing workflow engine that sits on top of all that. Vantage is a truly comprehensive product that can be used for several points in the ecosystem.”

Transcode Multiscreen and Lightspeed Server work together to provide GPU acceleration of video processing and H.264 encoding and to enable fast speeds. Support for Apple HLS, Adobe HTTP Dynamic Streaming, Microsoft IIS Smooth Streaming, MPEG-DASH, and MP4 formats is included. Transcode Multiscreen automates the entire process of source-file decoding, parallelized H.264 encoding, creation of adaptive-bitrate packages with encryption, archiving, delivery, and notification.

New with version 4.0, Vantage Transcode products can leverage Lightspeed Server to provide GPU-accelerated transcoding and video-processing across hundreds of formats, with 16-bit 4:4:4:4 YUV image quality, support for the x264 codec for high-quality H.264 transcoding, improved up/down/crossconversion and deinterlacing, plus support for new file formats.

Now available, Vantage 4.0 workflow automation features include new audio-loudness measurement and correction capabilities, providing compliance with CALM Act, Dolby Dialog Intelligence, EBU R 128, and ITU-R BS.1770-2 specifications.

Additional integrations with professional video systems allow automation of more complete file-based video workflows, including Avid, Civolution, Grass Valley, Harris, Irdeto, Nielsen, Omneon, Screen, and more.  A new advanced Avid option enables encoding and delivery to Avid Interplay with metadata. New integration with Civolution embeds digital forensic watermarking into any asset. A new Web-based Workflow Portal enables metadata entry, review, and approval from any Mac or PC browser, improved frame-accurate proxy editing, and thumbnail and list views.