Signiant Will Announce Apple FCP Support at NAB

by , 12:05 PM EDT, April 9th, 2008

Signiant, developer of a major digital media distribution management solution (DMDMS), will announce support for Apple's Final Cut Pro at the NAB show next week. Their system provides global, networked high speed file transfer, security, central management, automation, workflow and media integration.

The DMDMS system acts as an additional architectural layer that allows Avid users, and soon FCP users, to manage a digital media production with remote clients that may have special, additional capabilities.

"As digital media moves through the digital media supply chain, it can involve numerous time-consuming and manual tasks, from encoding content for distribution, to checking content in and out of asset management repositories, watermarking to ensure security, and formatting for its end destination," Signiant said on Tuesday.

"Signiant DMDMS 8.0 gives broadcast and network operations unprecedented flexibility in designing globally distributed workflows to automate each of these steps, ensuring seamless management, acceleration and security of file transfers."

TMO spoke with Tony Lapolito, V.P. of Marketing at Signiant, who explained that modern production systems often require various kinds of media formats to be distributed to different people who play different roles. For example, a documentary in production may require some large video files to be sent to a remote location that has special video processing functions while a different file format version with different compression may need to be sent to yet another location for management review and approval.

The DMDMS system achieves this with a central document management system, the UDP file transfer protocol, and AES-256-bit encryption. UDP allows for a much higher transfer efficiency on the Internet, perhaps 95 percent in contrast to between 5 and 20% for TCP/IP, depending on latency Mr. Lapolito said. A special check pointing system corrects for any errors in the UDP transmission and recovers from interrupted transfers.

The users can access some functions from within Avid and FCP as pull down menus that trigger workflow events to a remote facility. Remote clients can immediately see the task that's been requested in a popup and will automatically receive an e-mail notification as well.

DMDMS is designed for major movie or television studios that need to manage and distribute media products, quickly and securely, to several different remote locations with special expertise or management input. The custom creation and management of different client lists is available. Such an installation of the DMDMS starts at about US$50K, according to Mr. Lapolito and that includes up to ten client licenses for remote access. Additional client seats are $750.00 each.

Mr. Lapolito explained that there is really no competition in the market for a product like this. Some products do a piece of the work, but only the DMDMS covers all the bases in terms of central management, high speed distribution, security, and workflow management and the integration of client applications at remote locations.

In addition to new functionality in DMDMS version 8, integration with Apple's Final Cut Pro will be announced at NAB next week in Las Vegas. Delivery of ver. 8 is expected in the summer of 2008.