Marquis Broadcast's Medway promises to ease production bottlenecks

Marquis Broadcast, specialist in broadcast workflow studies and software solutions, has announced the launch of Medway, a new universal media exchange solution that enables media files from multiple sources to be transferred seamlessly between a wide variety of vendor platforms.
Medway also includes powerful EDL exchange functions and integration with asset management and other automation systems.
Designed specifically to meet the demands of the most challenging of environments, Medway is suitable for all digital applications, including newsrooms, playout centres, production and post production suites, and front and backroom processes. Medway eliminates file compatibility issues that occur when media and its associated metadata move between target devices, providing speedy and invisible format conversion as required.
“Despite the adoption of standards and the rapid onset of convergence in our industry, workflows are still hampered by tedious and repetitive operations due to file incompatibility,” said Granby Patrick, Managing Director, Marquis Broadcast. “Medway provides a simple and efficient route to eliminate these bottlenecks.”
Medway provides a simple drag and drop interface that allows users to move media between a range of broadcast servers and Avid editing systems. Lists of clips stored on the servers can be browsed from any Medway client and selected clips can be dragged into the Avid bin for editing. Omnibus Headline EDLs can be imported directly onto the Avid timeline, along with all associated media files. The finished edited sequence can be dragged from the Avid bin to a desktop icon for automated transfer to the transmission server. All transfers are carried out seamlessly as background tasks, leaving production staff free to concentrate on producing programmes.
Medway currently supports Leitch and Omneon servers along with a range of stand-alone Avids, and Unity and LanShare systems. Supported media formats include DV and DVC Pro 25 and IMX @ 30, 40 and 50 Mbit/s in both PAL and NTSC.
Future releases will include support for Panasonic P2, SeaChange, SGI, Thomson Profiles, Final Cut Pro and Ikegami’s disk-based cameras. Marquis Broadcast will also be announcing support for additional EDL imports later in the year.
Marquis Broadcast, www.marquisbroadcast.com
(SP)