Sydney-based full service broadcast video, Internet, video on demand and BluRay/DVD authoring facility Silver Trak Digital is one of Australia’s leading video encoding, transcoding, media duplication and mastering services companies. Their experience and sheer breadth of services mean that Silver Trak Digital can easily ingest video content of any description and transform, reproduce and aggregate that content to the specific media requirements of their clients. Silver Trak’s service is a personal one and their emphasis lies squarely on quality and client satisfaction.
Silver Trak offer a wide variety of services including broadcast video tape to broadcast video file transfers, encoding and transcoding to create both broadcast and internet video on demand file assets, broadcast quality video frame rate standards conversion, subtitling authoring and quality control services, video analysis and quality control services, and DVD and BluRay authoring.
In order to provide the fastest possible turn around frame rate standards conversion of broadcast quality video files to its clients, with the best possible conversion quality, Silver Trak has recently installed Snell Alchemist On Demand software at its Sydney facility, supplied and supported by Australian Snell Products Distributor Quinto Communications.
Silver Trak MD Christian Christiansen commented “We chose Alchemist OD as it suits the Silver Trak ethos of using the best equipment, best practices and best workflows to achieve the best result for our clients. As a result of using Alchemist OD we are now able to provide our clients not only with the best possible quality video file to video file conversions, but also the best turnaround times even on the most demanding conversion jobs.”
Using Snell award-winning image processing technology, Alchemist OD is a scalable software product, which offers unrivalled low cost format and frame rate conversion “On Demand”.
The software is able to perform complex frame rate standards conversions and format conversions between different video file formats, with unsurpassed video quality, in real time.
As an example, with Alchemist OD Silver Trak are able to take premium content delivered from the US in formats such as for example 1080P24 or 1080i59.94 ProRes and transparently create for example Australian Broadcast file deliverables in formats such as MXF wrapped XDCAM HD or DNxHD in the Australian 1080i50 HD broadcast standard. Equally Alchemist OD can take high bit rate broadcast quality files and deliver lower bit rate H.264 compressed files for Internet Video On Demand, or BluRay use. Alchemist OD can also perform SD to HD and HD to SD conversions as well as converting between different frame rates and can in fact support conversions to and from 2K and 4K content as well.
With the recent upgrade of their system to add the latest “Film Tools” software capabilities Silver Trak are also able to use Alchemist OD to seamlessly, quickly, and automatically handle content that has traditionally been very difficult to frame rate standards convert with good results in the past such as content containing a 3:2 field sequence.
For content that has been converted, from 23.98 fps or 24fps or 12fps animation, to the 59.94 fields per second or 59.94 frames per second US broadcast standards in the file based world, there are actually many possible ways that this is done.
The material may contain not only a 3:2 field sequence or cadence but other field sequences, such as 2:2:2:4 cadence, 2:3:3:2 cadence or even, for material that originated as 12 fps animation, 5:5 cadence is possible.
Silver Trak are able to use Alchemist OD to automatically recognise all of these different possible source material types and to always provide optimum conversions of the content into the desired format or formats.
The Alchemist OD software uses off the shelf GPU cards from NVidia and AMD to provide the compute power necessary for complex real time video processing and Snell can also offer turnkey ready to run systems including not just the software but the necessary Server grade PC hardware, fitted with powerful GPUs for processing, and optioned with sufficient video file storage capacity to meet customer needs.