买家指南:元数据

本文刊登在…的二/三月号 流媒体 杂志，年度 流媒体行业资料手册. 在这些买方指南文章中, we don't claim to cover every product or vendor in a particular category, but rather provide our readers with the 信息 they need to make smart purchasing decisions, sometimes using specific vendors or products as exemplars of those features and services.

Consider this scenario: A Cinderella college team finds itself rapidly rising through the ranks during March Madness. 到目前为止, no major sports or news outlet had paid more than cursory attention to the team’s captain or point guard, 但现在, every news outlet wants to know -- and see -- more about these two rising stars.

It doesn’t make sense to send copies of every game to every news outlet to let their editors sort through them. But the 虽然t of going through the games to pull out a highlight reel is so daunting, 几乎是不可能的. 体育主管的工作人员能做什么?

幸运的是, there are a number of video indexing and metadata extraction options on the market today. They’re available at varying pricing levels and equally varying levels of integration into video editing and streaming solutions.

Before buying one, 虽然, you need to ask a few key questions:

1. 元数据将在哪里使用? 这个问题听起来很简单, but buyers should consider whether metadata is going to be used by the end consumer, 通过资产管理系统, 由后期编辑器, 或者是所有这些的组合. The level of metadata typically needed by a paying customer is quite different from the metadata a “freemium” customer might expect. But both levels of metadata are just a drop in the bucket compared with what the video clip contains. 设定一个期望水平是关键.

元数据清单 2. 内容是否已经是基于文件的形式? 这听起来很简单, but there’s a staggering amount of content still being created on tape, 有多种数字和模拟格式. Getting the content into a file-based form is labor-intensive, 退一步说, but there’s a silver lining: While content is being digitized (or transferred from tape), 可以提取元数据.

3. How much metadata is being “lost” during the production process? 十多年前, my consulting firm did a study that found about 70% of all production metadata was orphaned as content passed from one part of the production workflow to the next. 今天, 至少又多了一点, al虽然 the number still hovers around 50% in most production and postproduction environments.

A representative from Sony explained it well at a recent Sports Video Group meeting: “The initial thrust of the XDCAM products has been interoperability of the video products,蔡崇信说, product manager for optical products at Sony Broadcast, talking about Sony’s optical-based HD cameras and recorders. “Now a lot of our efforts in working with third-party vendors are to enhance and have them make use of the metadata capability that we have.”

4. Does it make more sense to insource or outsource the metadata extraction? 答案要看, 当然, on the amount of content you need to extract metadata from, 所需的详细程度, and the need for it to integrate into your asset management and postproduction workflows.

在我们最初的场景中, given the rapid time to market and short shelf life of the content, sending it to a metadata extraction service may be the best bet.

在关闭, here’s an example of the power of using metadata from service provider Thought Equity Motion (TEM). In conjunction with the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), 特遣队已经打开了ACC金库, which provides an online video archive of men’s basketball games from all 12 ACC member schools.

TEM digitized and metadata tagged more than 100 games, including championship games and classic games the fans still talk about, in order to reconnect fans with their alma maters or favorite sports teams.

TEM创始人兼首席执行官, 凯文Schaff, noted that 93 seconds is the average length of time a user will spend watching a game that has no metadata. 然而,, Schaff explains that once “you add metadata down to the frame level, 用户平均使用时间为14分钟. That’s a huge increase in how people come in and consume the game in nonlinear form.”

So in our initial scenario, why not just go through a few games and put together a highlights reel? 这当然是一种方法, the bigger reason to consider a more thorough metadata scanning of content is the chance to find hidden gems. If you asked sports fans if they’d spend the time watching a game they had already seen, 他们通常会回答不. 添加元数据改变了等式, 虽然, by allowing sports fans (or reporters) to find those hidden gems.