ATLANTA — June 2, 2015 — Nexidia, a leading developer of dialogue and audio analysis products and technologies, today announced that high-definition (HD) broadcasting pioneer WRAL is using Nexidia Dialogue Search to search its recently digitized archive, going all the way back to 1976, of more than 26,000 video tapes. Nexidia’s Dialogue Search allows WRAL to search its entire archive and locate any spoken word or phrase in seconds despite having little useful metadata to aid the search.
“We digitized our whole archive not only to ensure that those assets would be preserved, but also to complete our transition to an entirely tapeless workflow. The problem is, many of those assets lack sufficient metadata to enable an effective search, and without it, individual clips or even entire assets would be so hard to find that they might as well be lost forever,” said Peter Sockett, director of engineering and operations at WRAL and its sister stations WRAZ and WILM. “Nexidia Dialogue Search gives us back our archive. It’s as simple as that. Now we’ll actually be able to repurpose those assets easily.”
Dialogue Search harnesses Nexidia’s patented phonetic search technology to enable search that is independent of logging, transcription, and/or captions. When metadata does exist, Dialogue Search can search and filter results using that metadata in combination with the dialog to refine and improve the search. WRAL collects search results into project bins that can be exported directly back to the media or production asset management system or to myriad NLE options, which provides WRAL the flexibility to use different editing solutions in its workflow.
Dialogue Search scans all of the audio in a media library almost instantaneously — 50x real time per CPU core — and creates an index of the elementary sounds of speech, called phonemes. This reliance on phonemes — not individual words — gives WRAL unprecedented accuracy in its search results. This approach requires no training and does not rely on a dictionary that could become outdated, and users need not even spell their queries correctly. It works across a wide variety of speakers with varied accents, and the probabilistic nature of the search algorithm means results can be found even in the presence of background noise.
“WRAL and its parent, Capitol Broadcasting, are known throughout the broadcasting industry as leaders in technology and innovation, and Peter Sockett has been honored for leading the transformation of television and bringing innovation and collaboration into day-to-day operation,” said Drew Lanham, senior vice president and general manager, Nexidia Media and Entertainment. “Also, WRAL was a pioneer in the development of HDTV, with a long string of HDTV ‘firsts’ dating back to 1996. It is a privilege to be helping this innovative organization maintain the value of its archive by ensuring its media is discoverable and, in turn, valuable.”
Sony Professional Services introduced WRAL to Nexidia through an alliance between Nexidia and Sony. WRAL will be using Dialogue Search in conjunction with its Sony Optical Disc Archive installation.
More information about Nexidia and its products is available at www.nexidia.tv.
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About Nexidia
Nexidia is the audio and video search company with patented technologies and breakthrough applications that make it quick and easy for customers to gain new insight, boost their competitive advantage, and monetize large volumes of audio and video assets from entertainment, sports, news, education, corporate, government, financial, house of worship, and non-profit organizations. More information is available at www.nexidia.tv.
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