Edmonton Police Service Reaches Milestone of 200,000 Video Assets Stored in CatDV MAM

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Square Box Systems today announced that the Edmonton Police Service (EPS), the municipal police force for the city of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, has passed a key milestone in its use of the CatDV media asset management (MAM) system: archiving of more than 200,000 video assets. Through CatDVs robust search, automation, and storage management capabilities, EPS can cost-effectively access and manage its large and growing library of content for outreach, training, and internal communications.

EPS employs almost 1,800 sworn officers and an additional 700 civilian staff, operating out of 15 stations throughout the city. With such a large workforce, effective training and consistent communications are a top priority for the EPS digital media unit. In addition to managing the departments website and social media presence, the digital media team produces many terabytes of video content every year, the majority of which is used internally for officer and employee training.

We are primarily a video production unit, with a minimal crew to produce and manage high volumes of output, said Bob Allman, video producer with the EPS digital media team. When we migrated to HD production and a fully digital production workflow almost seven years ago, we looked for a robust media asset management system that could help us store, manage, and access our video assets. It was also important that the system scale to support our future growth. Were very glad we chose CatDV from Square Box Systems, and it has exceeded all our expectations.

EPS has built a smooth and seamless workflow using CatDV for ingest, categorizing and tagging, and archiving. Assets are primarily video footage for internal training but also include video for public outreach campaigns and a large volume of still photos. Once video footage or stills are ingested, the CatDV Worker Node uses predefined workflows to save the clip to the appropriate folder and archive the assets to the EPS shared storage system, with simultaneous backups to nearline and offline storage. For large files, Worker Node automatically creates a low-resolution proxy for user access and review, preserving system resources by enabling sharing of the proxy rather than the full-resolution file.

We realized right from the beginning how much more efficient we could be with CatDV, but its especially valuable now that weve begun to work with 4K and very large files, Allman added. Our team members can start ingesting a file and then go home for the evening, and then when they come in the next morning, Worker Node has backed it up and put it in the media pool, ready for cataloguing in CatDV.

CatDVs customizable interface has allowed the digital media team to adapt the system over the years as its needs have evolved. As the organization grows and requirements change, the team is flagging types of content that might not have even existed a few years ago. CatDVs on-screen customization makes it very easy to adapt the system to the teams workflows.

The seamless integration of CatDV with storage systems means that the EPS digital media team members can always find the content they need, without having to worry about where it lives and without ever having to leave the CatDV interface, said Dave Clack, CEO, Square Box Systems. Plus, CatDVs ability to handle large volumes of content and scale with the organization is particularly valuable to EPS, all enabled by its metadata-handling capabilities. When EPS recently celebrated its 125th anniversary, CatDV played a big role in the celebration by helping the team access historical footage and photos. We are confident that theyll still be using CatDV when the 150th celebration comes around!

More information about Square Box Systems and CatDV is available at www.squarebox.com.

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About Square Box Systems

Square Box Systems is a privately owned software company specializing in media asset management and production workflows. Its industry-leading CatDV application, launched in 2001, brings order to the chaos of media file management by making it easy for content owners to repurpose and monetize their assets. Offering a powerful, user-friendly toolset and streamlined integration with a multitude of media workflow vendors, the CatDV software runs on Mac and Windows platforms and can be scaled from small workgroups to multiuser enterprise solutions managing millions of assets. In 2012, Square Box Systems was awarded the prestigious Queens Award for Innovation, conferred by HM Queen Elizabeth II. CatDV has also been honored with a number of awards including Creative Cows Blue Ribbon for Best Asset Management Tool and Videography Magazines Best of NAB Vidy Award. Based in the U.K., Square Box Systems sells CatDV globally through a network of distributors and resellers providing workflow design, local installation, consultancy, and support. More information is available at www.squarebox.com.

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