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Marquis Launches Interplay Metadata Export Tool

Valuable Interplay metadata can be saved and searched

Marquis Broadcast is launching its new Interplay Metadata Export Tool at NAB 2018, which will enable customers to take an Avid® Interplay® project and export all metadata for all assets in the project – essential when archiving projects from an Interplay system. Avid Interplay PAM has become a mainstay of many production workflows, relied upon daily by large and small production facilities around the world to find, track, archive and deliver projects. The Interplay Metadata Export Tool (IMET) copies and externalises Interplay metadata, making it searchable via a browser interface by operational staff. Importantly, the source externalised metadata record in Interplay can be safely deleted, thus reducing the size of the Interplay database and thereby improving the system’s performance, stability and indexing speed.

The new Marquis IMET utility works alongside the regular archiving process, exporting metadata so it’s fully-searchable via a website. This is useful when Interplay is getting full and needs archiving, yet you still want to be able to access important metadata. IMET will display a list of projects that you can open to see information such as headframes, AAF sequences and assets (master clips, sub clips, etc.), along with the metadata for each asset. Customers will be able to search across projects, assets or any special fields, and can even download the AAF sequences and put back into Avid Media Composer® if required.

Many customers have been using Interplay for years and have been actively managing the media on their Avid NEXIS® or ISIS® storage, usually archiving media after use. However, for very good reasons, they have intentionally not archived or deleted the Interplay metadata associated with project media that has been archived. Often, users want to keep the rich set of Interplay metadata online and available for later operational and production use – for example, searching and referencing the metadata to recover referenced media from an archive. The scale of the Interplay database can grow exponentially, ultimately adversely impacting Interplay performance.

IMET is simple in concept and operation. When a user wants to export metadata from Interplay, they just drag that project or folder to an Interplay watch folder. From there, a data extraction service picks it up, extracts all the user and system metadata, including any sequence AAFs, and creates a set of folders that contain the data wrapped in JSON files. A standard web server is pointed at this folder structure and delivers a simple web UI in a browser to any users who have the right to access this.

From the user’s perspective, they simply drag and drop the project in Interplay and, soon after, it appears in their web browser. Here, they can navigate the folders, project, media descriptions and metadata, and see head frames in a very familiar way, searching and browsing from any location that can see the web server.

“The benefits of exporting metadata like this are easy to understand,” comments Paul Glasgow, sales and marketing director, Marquis. “An export of the rich Interplay metadata makes it more accessible to users, since it’s open, transferable and greatly increases the workflow options for production facilities. Also, exported metadata can be backed up and the source Interplay version deleted, reducing the size of the Interplay database. This offers improved performance benefits in terms of speed and stability and – for some users – might be the first time the Interplay database has been reduced in size. IMET delivers many new downstream operational and integration possibilities to fully exploit the valuable Interplay metadata that customers have been carefully creating and collecting for many years.”

To find out more about Marquis Broadcast’s latest product announcements, please join them at NAB on stand SU6225. 

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