Logo

Product Spotlight: Venaca S3

Dec 2, 2002  •  Post A Comment

What it is: Venaca S3, a media asset-management system from Venaca in New York.
S3, which stands for “single source solution,” is designed to handle the entire asset-management process, from ingest to storage to transcoding to play-out. It replaces the labor- and time-intensive work flow of the analog world, said George Grippo, chief operating officer and president of the company. “We addressed the entire chain in every place we knew where there were bottlenecks in analog to greatly reduce the time to get audio, video, images,” he said. “It streamlines the production process.”
How it works: The system contains five modules: ingest and logging, transcoding, archive management, desktop and Web utilities and distribution. The ingest component allows the system to intake material from satellite feeds, tapes and other sources and convert it into digital files. The transcoding process enables the generation of a low-resolution proxy of media files, including video, still photos and Windows media files, among others. The archive-management tool controls the storage devices that hold files.
“When you deal with very large archives you need a multitiered system,” said Peter Horoszowski, chief technology officer with the company. The desktop and Web utilities function allows the user to take a piece of media and conduct frame-accurate editing on the desktop.
“You can look at any piece you have stored, edit on the desktop and do final editing in an edit room,” he said. The distribution module allows for the publication of any asset or clip to the Web, an e-mail list, an edit system or a video-on-demand server or on-air servers or onto physical tape.
Case in point: The Sesame Workshop uses the system to have better and quicker access to rights and payment information. The Sesame Workshop was able to realize a 22 percent return on investment in its first year.
Target market: The system is geared for broadcasters, production houses, high-end audio and video companies and anyone with media archives or content.
Availability: The current version was introduced at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in April.
Cost: A low-end system starts at $75,000 for a simple audio archive and runs into the millions for extensive broadcast archives.