AMSTERDAM (IBC) - Sept. 7, 2007 - In a significant upgrade to its industrial content mastering and repurposing workstation, Snell & Wilcox today announced iCR 2.5, which further enhances file-based workflows to deliver the industry's highest image quality at the lowest cost per deliverable.

iCR 2.5 enables fully automated content mastering and repurposing with advanced real-time quality control (QC) monitoring. Because as much as 40 percent of a typical customer's ingested content needs to be re-encoded due to QC issues, the system's automated QC functionality is a key differentiator. Operating in both the stream and file-based domains, iCR's automated QC tools enable it to offer the industry's lowest cost per deliverable by mitigating one of the most costly and labor-intensive
components of the content repurposing value chain.

iCR 2.5 enables users to create high-quality, error-free digital masters of their content and then repurpose these for distribution on multiple, revenue generating platforms. The new version of iCR being introduced at IBC2007, offers a wide range of significant enhancements, including:

Automated QC Streamlines Operations, Lowers Cost Per Deliverable With as much as 40 percent of a customer's content needing to be re-encoded due to QC issues, quality control has emerged as one important aspect of content mastering and repurposing. Unfortunately, it can also be very time-consuming and costly. This is because most customers manually perform QC tasks by reviewing content in real-time.

iCR 2.5 changes this by automating QC functionality for baseband video as well as a wide range of files, including MPEG-2, DV, DVCPRO, QuickTime, and WM9/VC-1. During ingest, iCR's QC tools monitor problems with videotapes or the VTR itself, as well as sound levels, timecode, and compression performance. iCR's QC review tools allow the operator to review and annotate alarms in order to generate an error report.

Enhanced automated QC monitoring is integrated into each step of the iCR workflow. This streamlines QC by enabling operators to pinpoint errors rapidly. Going far beyond monitoring the technical characteristics of the video, the QC functionality in iCR 2.5 can also evaluate the quality and makeup of the video, audio, and metadata content within the signal.

iCR 2.5 is the only content repurposing system available that allows the operator to view QC clips on a broadcast monitor in real-time with audio. This allows not only automated QC verification, but simultaneous real-time manual verification of video and sound on a video monitor.

Faster Repurposing Further Increases Operational Efficiency iCR's concurrent processing capabilities eliminate the need for separate encoding and transcoding processes ? replacing them with a single industrial-strength automated workflow. The upgraded system, up to 30 percent faster than the previous iCR system, is so efficient that multiple, simultaneous transcode processes with auto QC start as soon as the master encode process is underway. As a result, users can complete all their mastering and repurposing tasks in about the same time it would take to perform a single encode/transcode operation using a conventional workflow.

Stand 8.279 and M397