AmberFin Announces New Version of iCR with New Transcode Farm Control Capabilities, Increased roughput and Best in Breed Quality Control

AmberFin, a leading developer of file-based media ingest, transcoding and quality control solutions for content owners, broadcasters, sports organizations and post-production houses has today announced the introduction of the latest version of its iCR (Intelligent Content Repurposing) software platform. Already shipping globally, version 9.7 of iCR offers extended Avid integration, simplifying ingest and transcode processes within an Avid environment. Simultaneously, it provides enhanced quality and throughput for mezzanine formats such as ProRes, DNxHD and MPEG2. It supports additional codecs and wrappers as well as introducing new best of breed' function-specific UQC (Unified Quality Control) plug-ins.

This new version of AmberFin's iCR is the first to feature the company's new iCR Farm products, which build on market leading multi-format transcode capabilities of the iCR platform. They significantly increase the flexibility and versatility of a multi-node transcode environment, bringing improved resilience and robustness whilst simultaneously generating cost savings through more versatile network licensing capabilities.

We're witnessing rapid evolutionary developments in a range of markets from digital broadcast to OTT/TV Everywhere, Internet video and IPTV. This new version of iCR is designed to cater for these market developments by providing best-in-class image processing, consistently high quality results for all video codecs and a number of unique features such as our exceptional interlace, progressive and variable frame-rate handling capabilities within the software, commented Bruce Devlin, Chief Technology Officer at AmberFin.

Version 9.7 of AmberFin iCR provides significant new functionality in a number of areas including:

Enhanced Avid Workflow integration - AmberFin iCR now supports automated check-in to Avid InterPlay during ingest or transcode with the additional ability to create head frame thumbnails, dramatically simplifying the process of getting content into to Avid environments. Also, iCR now supports the creation of XDCAM HD in an AAF container.

UQC (Unified Quality Control) Updates - The AmberFin iCR platform's UQC timeline features a number of new updates, designed to extract more data from QC analysis tool support. As read clip metadata with each report and an increased level of detail on QC events enable even better judgment in the QC review process. The iCR Player now supports the playback of AS-02 files during ingest to reduce the time to fully ingest and QC assets in a scaled environment.

Updated Codecs - AmberFin iCR now includes support for a number of new codecs and updates to existing codecs. An updated ProRes implementation has increased quality, throughput, enhanced audio channel flexibility and enabled the carriage of closed captioning - additionally ingest and transcode is now supported without the requirement for an additional dongle simplifying both standalone and scaled deployments.

MPEG2-based formats now include options for ultra-high quality encoding enabling AmberFin customers to continue to differentiate themselves with the highest quality output. Now, iCR Transcode also supports DIF files with interleaved audio and XDCAM EX as inputs to the transcode engine supporting both archived and current ENG assets.

Closed Captioning - As well as carriage of captions in ProRes, iCR's closed caption tool kit has been further enhanced to include caption frame rate conversion and flexible caption payload source selection easing the carriage of closed-captioning through a file-based workflow.

About AmberFin

AmberFin's business is intelligent media conversion, solving file-based workflow challenges for broadcasters, sports organizations, post-production houses and other media content owners. Scalable, agile and efficient, the Amberfin iCR (intelligent Content Re-Purposing) Platform brings true innovation and cost-effectiveness to the demands of multi-platform delivery, enabling the industry to deal with high volumes and true-to-source high quality pictures at the same time, all with exclusive slim-file technology.

Unique to the iCR Platform, AmberFin's industry leading approach to Quality Control, known as Unified Quality Control (UQC), introduces a QC mark that brings a new level of trust to media assets. UQC uniquely combines, automated processes that integrate third party verification tools with a human touch, enabling more efficient and effective decision-making and new levels of confidence in the file creation and transformation processes. AmberFin continues to experience market growth thanks to hundreds of iCR systems being deployed worldwide. Systems that are trusted where quality matters by some of the world's leading media organizations including Sony Pictures, Warner Brothers, Turner Broadcasting, Canal+, ITV, ZDF, NRK, Nine Network Australia, Discovery and National Geographic. To follow the latest innovations in Broadcast-IT workflow technologies visit blog.amberfin.com

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