Australian caption centre supports restoration and captioning with Omneon Spectrum

Omneon Video Networks has announced that the Omneon Spectrum media server system is being employed by the Australian Caption Centre, Australia's leading media access organisation and one of the largest captioning companies in the world, to support flexible media ingest and storage for restoration, captioning, and remastering of tape-based video.
"The Omneon Spectrum media server system proved to be the most robust and flexible solution for supporting the growing volume of video we work with every day," said Robert Scott, Australian Caption Centre CEO. "Because it's engineered as a broadcast server, it's incredibly robust and reliable, and it integrates well with applications such as Final Cut Pro, one of the tools we use for restoration work. The Omneon Spectrum system's modular design also enables easy and cost-effective expansion, which will allow us to scale the server to match our business needs."
The Australian Caption Centre has integrated its Omneon Spectrum server system as a production server in its Shine Sound and Pictures business unit. It is used first to perform an initial uncompressed ingest off of tape - typically older one-inch tape provided by restoration clients in the television industry, as well as from theatres, hospitals, hotels, and cinemas. By digitising this sometimes delicate media, editors can play out video repeatedly from the server system as they work without causing further degradation of the tape. During restoration work, editors simply open, modify, and save content on the Omneon file system through standard Final Cut Pro protocols.
For the company's captioning business, the Omneon Spectrum is used to play material to a teletext inserter, which records teletext captions in the vertical blanking interval. The captioned material is then recorded as transmission-quality masters on Digital Betacam and delivered to the client. Future additions to the Omneon Spectrum server system may include the Omneon ProBrowse product for creating low-res proxies, which the Australian Caption Centre could then integrate with software from third-party suppliers to enable direct insertion of teletext directly into the video file on the Omneon system.
The Australian Caption Centre is currently working with a 2-TB Omneon Spectrum media server system configured with two uncompressed media ports and two MPEG/DV media ports.
(GB)