- Sales
- Support
Home to over a million hours of historic footage and growing at the rate of 20 hours a day, ITN Source is the world’s largest and most diverse footage business. Drawn from imagery captured over three centuries, the collection features news, drama, celebrity, comedy, music, natural history and film from the collective libraries of Reuters, ITN, ITV, Fox News, Fox Movietone, Channel 9 News, UTV and Asian News International.
The London HQ of ITN Source at Gray’s Inn Road is a fascinating combination of the latest digital technology alongside legacy tape machines and telecines, required to be kept in working order to play the vast quantity of masters including more than 10,000 1” tapes.
To assist in the digitisation of nearly every conceivable tape format and to create file-based material for clients, ITN Source purchased ContentAgent which, according to Archive Technical Supervisor David Price now forms the natural hub of the operation with every uncompressed file passing through it at some stage.
The workflow designer in ContentAgent enables complex workflows incorporating capture from tape, transcoding multiple formats and DVD authoring to be fully automated. “That’s a huge time-saver,” asserts Price. “Once we’ve set up and saved the workflow template the system can be used by non-technical staff. We have set up in-house training courses for operators and they have all taken to it easily. The user interface is very straightforward with a pleasing lack of multi-layered menus to wade through and the touch-screen is much appreciated. And throughput is impressive. We are now producing about 200 Gigabytes of uncompressed material a day and, during the summer of 2009 ContentAgent was working flat out 24/7 for three months.
“Formerly a DVD showreel might typically take a couple of days to produce. Now, beside using ContentAgent for the capture and transcoding, we use it for standards conversion, to trim the clips, brand them and author interactive DVDs – with the entire process taking about half a day. The DVD authoring facility also opens up another business opportunity for us, in the past year we’ve created over 70,000 DVD copies in-house.”
DVD authoring in ContentAgent is now fully integrated with Rimage disc publishing and duplication and ITN Source are able to utilise the graphics toolset to create and output high quality printed discs.
The operation at ITN Source, with vast amounts of material encompassing many different types of film and tape formats is a necessarily complex one. “ContentAgent has certainly helped streamline our workflow,” adds Price,” but it’s much more than simply about the product. We’ve had great support from ROOT6 Technology which is always receptive and keen where able, to incorporate user-generated suggestions in the software release.
“We don’t think of ContentAgent as just a transcoding device. In fact we don’t tend to use it for highly compressed formats as that’s not really relevant for us. Quality is the key issue. It’s much more than that, it’s a workflow management and automation tool and a pretty robust one at that. We pride ourselves on good service and strive to give clients more than they want for less than they expect to pay. ContentAgent helps us to achieve that objective.”
About ITN Source
With headquarters in London, ITN Source has sales offices in New York, Berlin, Paris, Sydney and Tokyo. For further information, visit www.itnsource.com