Video’s Freeze Frame
Think printing on the rough equivalent of toilet paper is tough? Try printing a frame grab from a video image on that tissue-like newsprint.
Make no mistake, newsprint and video generally don’t mix. But a Boston company with roots in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab is readying for market a product that helps unmuddy video-image grabs.
Large newspapers and wire services have long used video stills, typically as a last resort or to report breaking news. They generally cobble together the hardware to do so, using off-the-shelf video cards and software plug-ins for such programs as Adobe Systems Inc.’s Photoshop to generate low-resolution images.
Enter Salient Stills Inc., founded in 1997 by MIT grad Laura Teodosio. The company’s VideoFOCUS is a single "black box" based on a Windows NT workstation equipped with proprietary software and a professional-quality video board. It digitizes up to an hour of moving video, displays frame-by-frame thumbnail images and then generates higher-resolution files of selected frames, adding header information for export to a newspaper’s archive or editorial front-end.
Image quality improves because the system takes the selected frame and compares it to ones immediately before and after it to create "sub-pixel information." So instead of taking one pixel and doubling it to enlarge an image from the 72 dots-per-inch available on-screen to the 100-plus lines-per-inch required for newspaper printing, the system actually adds new pixel data from the neighboring frames, resulting in better quality.
A half-dozen newspapers and wire services have been considering the equipment, says CEO Steven D. Hill. Metro dailies and the wires, many of which have such video assets as cable-news operations, may seem the logical candidates for the technology. But Hill insists VideoFOCUS has applications for even the smallest publishers. Noting that many local meetings are covered on cable television, he says the ability to grab presentable stills from such meetings could bring relief to overtaxed photo departments.
"We see it as more valuable to papers with less resources," he says. "It gives them access to content they might not have otherwise."
DAM’s Digital Transformation
Even as technologists continue debating the very definition of the term, digital-asset management threatens to transform itself. A panel of SuperConference speakers offered advice on how to weather the change.
Citing a Forrester Research study, Bob Kurtz of KPMG LLP noted that while 1999 was a year of "point solutions," 2000-2001 will see moves toward "asset sharing."
To see this theory put into action, look no further than The New York Times. In recent years, Rachel Coates, the paper’s news-systems manager, purchased Canto Corp.’s Cumulus and T/one Corp.’s Merlin to handle images in separate production and archive environments. Her goal for 2000 is "to develop an overall strategy for a unified, integrated approach to DAM."
Cumulus, which the Times brought online in early 1998, performs well, boasts a flexible database structure, and is easily customized using scripts, said Coates. On the downside, Cumulus users can–and do–delete entire categories in the database. She also has concerns about scalability and Canto’s dedication to the newspaper market.
The Times’ Merlin archive contains photos dating to 1993. It is feature-rich, and T/one understands newspaper work flows, said Coates. The minuses? A single large file system that is not easily partitioned, dependence on a single platform (Microsoft Windows NT), and again, questionable scalability.
NAA Staff Attorney Toni Gilbert closed the session with a discussion of electronic rights and permissions. Citing a recent court decision backing the rights of free-lancers, Gilbert suggested that publishers review free-lance agreements to ensure they protect the newspaper’s right to publish stories in electronic databases or online.