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Product Spotlight: VideoLogger

Jan 27, 2003  •  Post A Comment

What it is: VideoLogger from Virage.
What it does: VideoLogger is an ingest system to help manage large amounts of video. It is a software application that manages the intake of video to organize, tag and manage it.
How it works: VideoLogger can capture video from several sources-a video tape, a satellite feed or a file. The system ingests the material and begins indexing it and pulling keywords from the video. It can accomplish this by extracting closed-captioning data and translating it into metadata. VideoLogger also contains plug-ins from analysis engines for speech recognition, speaker ID and on-screen text recognition, among others, said Jeff Karnes, director of product marketing for Virage. In addition, a user can enter keywords and metadata manually. Finally, the system can pull metadata from external sources such as a file containing a transcript. “If you give us a source-a tape, satellite feed or file-we can bring it into our environment and start working on it and doing the indexing and encoding,” Mr. Karnes said.
All in the timing: “This is a real-time process,” he said. “We process just as fast as comes in. If video is in an analog form, we can encode it in real time to a digital form. We can encode into MPEG formats, Real, Windows. What makes [VideoLogger] unique is the amount of information that can be captured in real time outside the system-automatic, manual and external. We can do all that indexing at the same time in real time. Because we control the encoding, we can synchronize the metadata and the video in real time.”
What it doesn’t do: VideoLogger is an ingest engine, not an asset-management system. It feeds its information into an asset-management system, such as proprietary systems, those from other vendors and Virage’s own asset-management systems for Web publishing and webcasting.
History: The product was introduced in 1996 and is now on its fifth generation. VideoLogger counts more than 375 customers, with nearly a third being media companies. Broadcast clients include CNN, CBS, ABC and Fox. CNN, for instance, ingests 120 to 150 hours of content each day through VideoLogger. The current version introduced in September 2002, includes internationalization capabilities, with which the VideoLogger 5.0 can recognize language characters and Chinese, German and Japanese.
Cost: The system starts at $15,000.