Issue link: http://osercommunicationsgroup.uberflip.com/i/261448
B r o a d c a s t e r s S h o w D a i l y Tu e s d a y, A p r i l 9 , 2 0 1 3 6 ELIMINATING AERIAL LIMITATIONS: NEW CREATIVE FREEDOM WITH CINEFLEX By Ron Chapple, Founder, Aerial Filmworks I have been filming aerials for more than 20 years. With thousands of hours in hel- icopters filming everything from the exotic wildlife to extreme sports to the most beautiful landscapes our world has to offer, I feel privileged to deliver cre- ative excellence and technical perfection to our clients. Our clients and directors want the world's best imagery. That is why I have trusted Cineflex for nearly a decade. The newest Cineflex ELITE system with the ARRI ALEXA has invigorated our clients with an unprece- dented image quality. The Cineflex ELITE provides direc- tors more creative freedom than any other stabilized Super 35 Format system available today. Bringing the Super 35 Format digital productions to an entirely new level through the integration of a rock solid 5-axis gyro-stabilized gimbal assembly, the Cineflex ELITE provides our Aerial Filmworks team with unmatched precision and stability in all weather conditions. In addition to providing exceptional range-performance, precision and stabil- ity, the Cineflex family of products allows for cost-effective transport of equipment to locations around the world. Weighing in at just 85 pounds, the compact design of the Cineflex ELITE allows us to check our gear as excess baggage on commercial flights. This has provided us with significant cost savings by eliminating the need for freight for- warders and custom brokers saving our clients time and money. Most importantly, the ease of transport means our crew and equipment arrive at the shoot together when the director needs us, even on short notice. Once we're on location, the mobil- ity of the Cineflex systems is further strengthened by the ease of installation. One person can rig a Cineflex ELITE onto a wide variety of aircraft and mobile platforms in under an hour. At Aerial Filmworks, we have been able to seamlessly inte- grate the Cineflex ELITE onto all of our platforms with ease. We even created a time-lapse video documenting how easy it is to mount a Cineflex ELITE on a helicopter in well under an hour. The video will be rolling at the Cineflex booth C5046, so please come by and check it out. The Cineflex family of camera systems continues to revolutionize the digital production industry through its diverse offering of affordable, feature film quality equip- ment for all productions anywhere in the world. For more information, visit booth C5046 at NAB 2013, call +1 530.271.2500, email info@cineflex.com and go online to www.cineflex.com. Video quality is a cornerstone of any video service. Video quality of experi- ence (QoE) has become a keyword with- in the video industry and in the process encompasses a lot of different aspects of the user experience. There are multitudes of ways to calculate or estimate QoE. For video that has been transmit- ted over an IP network and encoded using MPEG, there are several indica- tors of QoE, like the bandwidth, pro- gram rate, quantizer, GOP, etc. These can all be used to estimate QoE, but fall short because they don't actually look at the decoded video to determine the video quality. Only perceptual quality metrics measure the video payload using mod- els of the human eye to determine the quality that users actually see with their own eyes. Perceptual quality met- rics measure things like colorfulness, blur, frozen video, jerkiness, black screens, blockiness, scene complexity, motion levels, etc. Why are perceptual quality metrics important? Perceptual quality metrics are critical QoE measurements because they are based upon real-world subjective experi- ments where people watch videos and provide quality ratings and a list of arti- facts that were seen. Cheetah then uses this data to develop its human video sys- tem model. Cheetah's solutions have dozens of algorithms that model different parts of the human vision system and then combine the results into a V-Factor score. Cheetah's V-Factor score matches the subjective results with more than 90 percent correlation. How are perceptual quality tools used in the real world? Perceptual video quality monitoring is not just a theory; it is actively being used by service providers and programmers today to ensure their video products are maintained with a high level of quality, and to immediately know when it is not. Moreover they know what the artifacts are, where they occur and who/what is responsible for the degradation. Using this service providers and programmers can resolve the true video quality issues that still exist within their operations. Summary Perceptual video quality monitoring is the next substantial phase of QoE moni- toring. Rather than monitoring the net- work for errors or looking for issues with MPEG, perceptual quality tools simply "watch" the video just like a viewer would see it. This is critical at three pri- mary points: First, transmission from the programmer. Second, reception by the service provider. Third, encoding by the service provider. These three points ensure that quality is maintained and when there are issues it is clear where the issue exists and who can resolve it. Today, programmers and video serv- ice providers may have great quality, they may have horrible video quality or they simply don't know unless they are watching everywhere all the time. Only an automated solution like Cheetah's can do that. By using perceptual video quali- ty monitoring tools, you can solve this last remaining part of the QoE puzzle. For more information, contact Jeremy Bennington at jbennington@chee- tahtech.com or call 408-307-1164. CHEETAH TECHNOLOGIES INCREASES YOUR QUALITY OF EXPERIENCE LYRICAL LABS' ENCODING PROVIDES HIGH QUALITY VIDEO STREAMS AT HALF THE BITRATE An interview with Ed Ratner, CTO/Founder, Lyrical Labs LLC. BSD: Tell us about Lyrical Labs. ER: Lyrical Labs was founded in 2010 to develop video encoding solutions that leverage a proprietary object based analysis approach. Our technology allows us to deliver video streams at comparable quality to others―at half the video bitrate. BSD: Where is Lyrical Labs based? ER: Our corporate headquarters are in New York City. The technical develop- ment team, including myself, is based in Iowa City. BSD: A high-tech start-up in Iowa? ER: Actually, Iowa City has a large num- ber of high-tech start-ups per capita. In our office building, there is an incubator dedicated to launching start-ups. It is a very dynamic environment. BSD: Lyrical Labs is a new company. How tried and tested is your technology? Would new customers be taking a big risk? ER: Lyrical Labs has been in successful beta testing relationships since late 2011. We've had paying customers for about a year now, and we've encoded hundreds of thousands of videos in our cloud serv- ice and our appliances. Our existing cus- tomers are quite happy and willing to serve as references. BSD: What exactly does Lyrical Labs offer today? ER: We currently offer two H.264 encoding solutions. Our cloud service is oriented toward archived content encoding and is a fully scalable, on- demand service. Our appliance offers live transcoding into H.264 video formats for resolutions up to 1280 by 720. It also supports encoding for archived content and has the capabil- ity to do live transcoding and archiving simultaneously. BSD: We have been hearing a lot about the HEVC standard lately. How does that impact Lyrical Labs' product line and position in the marketplace? ER: HEVC is a very exciting develop- ment in video compression and offers very interesting possibilities for the future. It will take a period of time for HEVC decoders to be deployed in the marketplace, so we believe H.264 will still be in heavy use for a number of years. We do believe the HEVC will be important and we believe that our object- based approach will lead to similar advantages as demonstrated by our H.264 encoder. We are in the process of developing an HEVC solution. BSD: What will that HEVC solution entail? ER: We will support encoding into the HEVC format on both our cloud serv- ice and on our appliance. Our appliance will support live transcoding into the HEVC format. BSD: When will your HEVC solution be available? ER: Our in-the-cloud solution will be available within the next few months. We anticipate releasing an HEVC enabled appliance shortly thereafter. BSD: What else would you like to add? ER: We invite all our potential customers and partners to come see us at our booth at the NAB show. For more information, visit booth SU10624 at the NAB Show, go online to www.lyricallabs.com, call 630-621-9264 or e-mail info@lyricallabs.com.