NAB 2011: Front Porch Digital To Debut SAMMAsolo HD

At the 2011 NAB Show, Front Porch Digital will debut its SAMMAsolo HD migration solution, built on the company’s newly patented SAMMA video migration process. According to Front Porch Digital, SAMMAsolo HD is the industry’s first solution to perform real-time, quality-controlled migration of content from HD videotape into a secure, managed digital environment that both supports preservation and facilitates access. A technology preview of SAMMAsolo HD will be available at Front Porch Digital’s booth at NAB (N5806).

“Until SAMMA came along, enterprises seeking to digitize content stored on HD videotape had to rely on unwieldy and slow homegrown solutions that required untold hours of tedious, difficult work for staff using bulky and trouble-prone encoding equipment,” says Mike Knaisch, president and CEO of Front Porch Digital. “Worse yet, after all that investment of time, money, and energy, the digitized result was unpredictable and often unsatisfying. Like Front Porch Digital’s other SAMMA products, the SAMMAsolo HD migration solution meets a pressing need by enabling broadcasters, heritage institutions, and other enterprises to preserve and make use of their legacy assets.”

Front Porch Digital’s SAMMAsolo migration solutions combine hardware and software to move archive-quality content from videotape to multiple file formats in a single pass. Because SAMMAsolo automates repetitive steps and uses advanced signal analysis to evaluate the quality of the videotape and to monitor and document the migration itself, the work can be accomplished with minimal staff training or staff time. The process preserves source timecode and also associates indexing and technical metadata.

The SAMMA migration solution includes SAMMAprep for accessioning videotape libraries, SAMMAclean for cleaning the videotape itself, and the SAMMAsolo device, which performs the actual digitization. A four- or seven-stream migration robot is also available. The SAMMAsolo HD enables users to customize their own output migration templates by specifying formats to meet their storage and usage goals as well as the quality control requirements of their tape library. Output files, stored locally on the SAMMAsolo cache disk, can be passed to any destination using the FTP gateway, or transferred to Front Porch Digital’s DIVArchive content storage management system for facilitated storage, access, and repurposing.

Front Porch Digital’s SAMMAsolo HD is part of the fourth generation of SAMMA technology under the DIVASolutions banner of products to migrate, manage, and market media content securely, efficiently, and cost-effectively.