“Ingesting media into your media asset management system should be the most important stage of the content production chain. Everything you do here can affect other users further down the line,” said James Varndell, IPV product manager. “In the fast environment of a live production, metadata is commonly the first thing that’s dismissed because associating all the necessary tags can be time consuming. Ingest Director lets operators associate descriptive metadata faster than ever before which benefits everyone in the post-production process.

“Ingest Director avoids the need for content producers to deploy any more resources for metadata tagging while ingesting multiple live camera feeds directly into their MAM system. Ahead of recording, operators can prepare for events by creating placeholder assets and associating relevant metadata to them. Then during ingest, camera feeds are recorded and used to create assets which take the place of the dummy media. Live, users only need to add action-specific metadata because the important tags and information are transferred from the original placeholder. This provides post-production operators with media that features more descriptive, accurate metadata without any additional resources at the front end.”

The product’s functionality is suited to instances in which permanent cameras are in place. If they know what objects or subjects will always be in shot, users can create presets with associated metadata for each camera. Then during ingest they only need to add metadata tags that are event-specific. And when deployed for the ingest of live sports media, operators can pre-program sport-, team- or player-specific tags so they appear immediately on content ingest. Then they only need to add the specifics of a play or an action and still benefit from much more detailed metadata.

A simple colour-coding shown in the Curator system provides an overview of its status - whether it’s recording, waiting or set to delayed record. It also provides a timecode on all ingest feeds and gives users the ability to start and stop single or multiple feeds. Collections – or groups of clips – can also be created as placeholders either before ingest or live. These collections can then be searched for as a whole in Ingest Director, making for much easier search and discovery functions for post-production. This collections-orientated functionality also means users don’t need to associate each camera angle with the placeholder asset and name them manually. Instead, they’re able to load the entire collection and Ingest Director intelligently records each angle into the correct assets.