Encompass Digital Media Taps Danmon Group | United Kingdom For Integrated Ingest Solution

Encompass Digital Media has selected Danmon Group | United Kingdom to provide an integrated ingest solution for its UK network operations center. Located in central London, the facility serves as a broadcast hub for tier one multi-national media companies, broadcasters and corporations.

“We required an efficient way to digitise archives containing hundreds of thousands of tape assets for storage as digital files at the highest quality,” comments Keir Shepherd, Director, Technology Strategy at Encompass EMEA. “Danmon Group | United Kingdom proposed a solution that would seamlessly connect with our Sony Flexicart automated tape robots. They have designed a complete mobile ingest station based on six systems working as one solution. It performs very well – operationally it is simple, fast and reliable. Most importantly, it creates high quality encoded files.”

“We designed, integrated, supplied and installed a complete solution based on Dalet’s AmberFin Ingest software and Broadware’s Flexis control software products,” adds Danmon Group | United Kingdom Product Sales Manager Chris Elson. “Encompass chose this solution for its operational efficiency and proven ability to deliver the best possible image quality. There are six ingest servers arranged in pairs, all of which are housed in the Encompass EMEA tape archive. Each pair is easily transportable and connected to a Flexis controller ingesting from two VTRs running inside a Flexicart. Operation is simple…load the Flexicarts and press the go button!”

For the Encompass tape library, Danmon Group | United Kingdom found that the original barcode reader had limited functionality. Danmon Group | United Kingdom designed an upgrade for the barcode readers in the Flexicarts to support a far wider range of barcodes, removing the need to re-label tape assets and ensuring the asset barcode ID becomes the file name. Danmon Group | United Kingdom also integrated the VTR error data logging so any ingest VTR errors can be called using a REST API. This is especially important when dealing with tape archives that may not have been played in a VTR for some years.