Moving Media Open Cutting-Edge LA Encoding Studio

Following increased demand from European online video companies sourcing material in the US, video encoding specialist Moving Media have set up a brand new studio in Santa Monica, LA, equipped to deal with a wide range of broadcast video formats.
Offering state-of-the-art facilities to encode from tape to file or provide transcoding of existing digital assets, the new studio has a strong focus on audio quality. Studio Principal Bruce Maddocks has over 30 years experience of sound production, television scoring and studio design expertise, merged with extensive knowledge of mixing, mastering, analog archival and restoration.
With strong broadcast engineering talent in house, Moving Media's LA team are well-equipped to produce output of any format for iPod, IPTV or Archival with systems for secure VPN delivery as well as FTP and support for all-important DRM-enabled encoding.
Moving Media employ a 3-stage encoding process designed to optimise the quality of encoded video. Starting from tape, an uncompressed digital version is fine edited to exclude slates and breaks. Moving Media pay particular attention to the useable screen area, cropping the frame to give the best results, removing noise and misalignments before checking audio phase alignment and levels. Director Simon Factor explained: "We tend to apply the technology in our own special way. We don't see encoding as being a 'roll tape hit button' process. Our encoding service is designed to optimise the quality of the encoded video and to present the content in a way that is effective within its target platform."
The studio's first project for Getty Images involved transferring a collection of several hundred clips from tape to MP4 files covering a range of archive footage from the 1920s to 1960s including public service announcements. The LA studio used Digital Rapids technology to implement fine editing, progressive scan and audio remastering measures to enhance content recorded some 40-80 years ago.
Simon concluded: "The US studio is a significant move for the company and we are very happy with the reaction from both our existing customers and the market. Encoding is a hot topic at the moment and there is room in the US market for an encoding specialist. We focus only on encoding and the processes that support the delivery of digital video content."
Moving Media have facilities in Dublin and Los Angeles. Further information is available at: www.movingmedia.co.uk.
(KMcA/JM)