Archiva Engineering A Successful IBC2014

Visitors to Archimedia's stand will experience firsthand its range of tools on HD and UHD screens, including the foundation of its product line, the Archimedia Master Player. Archimedia will also introduce a new player built for everyday business use and a suite of desktop quality-measurement tools that replace existing desktop applications and traditional SDI hardware.

NEW Archimedia Enterprise Player
At IBC2014, Archimedia will demonstrate the Archimedia Enterprise Player, a new player designed for all stakeholders — expert or not — who must be able to view professional video reliably and precisely in order to do their jobs, especially those who need specialised technical support to deal with professional media. Users range from those who lack the technical expertise to use professional video tools, to video experts who simply need to review their work without tying up an edit suite.
The Archimedia Enterprise Player installs easily on any computer equipped with Windows® 7 or 8 by simply downloading the software from Archimedia's website. Users can get media-specific email support from Archimedia, as well as Archimedia's live online or phone support when needed. The Archimedia Enterprise Player plays all professional and consumer video and audio formats except for JPEG 2000, DPX, and 4K/UHD, which are found only in cinematic or production masters. Like the Master Player, the Enterprise Player can play captions and subtitles in more than 80 external formats and more than 50 embedded formats, and all video can play to a normal TV over HDMI so that what the user sees is real TV rather than a PC approximation of it. The Enterprise Player also delivers accurate audio in all modes — fast forward, rewind, slow, and scrub.

NEW Archimedia QuSeeTM Suite - IBC2014 will see the debut of the Archimedia QuSeeTM Suite, a family of tools to inspect and measure video, audio, and metadata for broadcast, postproduction, A/V, mastering and distribution. Working in tandem with the Archimedia Master Player, the Archimedia QuSee Suite brings validation and verification functions to the desktop, allowing users to perform quality tests on files rather than on SDI streams created from files. The Archimedia QuSee Suite replaces aging SDI hardware such as video and audio waveform monitors, vectorscopes, and audio phase meters, as well as their desktop counterparts, which don't come with a player that supports all of the common professional mastering formats as Archimedia Master Player does.
The Archimedia QuSee Suite contains a traditional video waveform monitor and vectorscope in a desktop floating window, with support for SD, HD, UHD, and 4K video sizes; standards-based frame rates; and all professional video formats including broadcast, cinema, and Web. For audio, a traditional audio waveform monitor and phase meters appear live in a desktop floating window. The audio tools support uncompressed PCM and compressed audio formats including Dolby®. One benefit of integrating desktop validation and verification with the Archimedia Master Player is the player's unique ability to keep compressed video and compressed audio in perfect sync, even in fast forward, rewind, and slow-motion modes — an important factor in all kinds of media work.

Archimedia Master Player v2.2
At IBC2014, Archimedia will display the newest version of its inaugural product, the award-winning Archimedia Master Player. Designed for video engineers, producers, directors, manufacturers, and archivists who work with professional video formats, Archimedia Master Player is the first software player to support all common master formats in use today and the first to allow users to view, test, and measure archival-quality files on a standard UHD/HDTV and traditional SDI equipment. This revolutionary capability not only makes content deliverable more quickly at higher quality, but also makes it unnecessary to create and store the content in other formats. The ability to control audio and video remotely using RS-422 jog/shuttle wheels, with smooth scrub sounds for all supported formats in slow-motion, forward, and reverse, is one of the features that makes the player a true 4K-era replacement for videotape machines for master-grade quality control and archiving functions.
Version 2.2 delivers the ultimate set of formats and features to make Archimedia Master Player the player of choice for media professionals. Besides support for the emerging formats HEVC 4K and IMF, version 2.2 has a caption and subtitle viewer/navigator; high-quality scaling into SDI; the ability for nontechnical users such as archivists, directors, producers, and quality control specialists to decrypt digital cinema packages; and folder traversing for sequences such as DPX, TIFF, and EXR, which typically come in folders of thousands of files.

Archimedia HD-SDI, 4K-SDI, and Quad 4K-SDI Cards
At IBC2014, Archimedia will display the Archimedia HD-SDI, 4K-SDI, and Quad 4K-SDI cards for the Archimedia Master Player. The cards, made by Bluefish444, include a Master Player installer that will flash the cards' firmware so that they behave properly under control of the Master Player. By deploying the cards, video engineers and archivists can use an Archimedia Workstation as an HD or cinematic-quality videotape player or disk-based SDI video server. (The most sophisticated users could even deploy the cards with the Archimedia Master Player software on a standard Windows® 7 or 8 computer.) Under the control of the Archimedia Master Player, the user's HDTV or UHDTV can display a video file at the same frame rate as the original when in full-screen mode, marking the first time that an HDMI monitor and SDI monitor can be faithfully compared up to 4K resolution alongside a computer desktop. For quality control, the file's technical metadata can be viewed while the file is playing.

Archimedia Advanced Test Suite
Along with other products that accompany the Archimedia Master Player, Archimedia will demonstrate the Archimedia Advanced Test Suite, including test pattern videos up to 4K designed in cooperation with the Library of Congress and a major global OTT VOD provider. These are a set of advanced test patterns developed by renowned video test and measurement company VideoQ specifically for aligning monitors precisely and pushing codec systems to the limit. Designed for use with the Archimedia Master Player and available in HD and 4K versions, the Archimedia Advanced Test Suite allows users to test, align, configure, troubleshoot, and stress any equipment with an SDI or HDMI input. Such devices include encoders, transmitters, video recorders, monitors, projectors, standards converters, editors, and ingest and capture devices. When combined with partner VideoQ's VQMA-3 software analyzer and one of Archimedia's SDI conversion cards, the Master Player and Advanced Test Suite offer the industry's first full-featured test environment that is far less costly and far easier to transport than previous comparable test environments.

The article is also available to read in BFV online.

(IT/CD)