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AmberFin iCR has the best HD in the market globally, ensuring new revenue opportunities are exploited to their full potential
Improve the quality of your masters
Enjoy trouble-free masters with AmberFin’s iCR Mastering
The old computing axiom of ‘rubbish in, rubbish out’ applies perfectly to today’s file-based video environment.
Rely on a less-than-perfect master and your output is likely to be much less than perfect. But there is a way to master the situation.
AmberFin’s iCR Mastering gives you one of the highest-quality masters on the market. And its superior automation and integration capabilities mean you can take advantage of this quality within a factory-line workflow setting.
Get more value from your archives
How much value are you getting right now from your archive material? Are your thousands of tapes making you money? Or are they costing you in terms of storage, while gradually degrading and losing value?
With iCR Mastering you can easily and quickly create the best possible quality master files out of your old tapes.
This means you can start making money from them and preserve them before they degrade excessively or get damaged in fires or floods, or the videotape recorders that can read them become obsolete.
Output to virtually anything
With iCR Mastering it’s easy to create files in a wide range of formats and wrappers, and to ingest uncompressed files and transcode them in software.
iCR Mastering offers one of the best ingest qualities on the market at low, medium or high bit-rates, in more than 30 different video formats and a wide range of codecs and wrappers.
Ingest directly to NAS and SAN
Are you wasting time and money by ingesting files onto local storage on a computer before you can transfer them to your centralized storage archive, simply because your encoder doesn’t work well over storage area networks (SANs)?
With iCR Mastering you get solid reliability on almost any network-attached storage (NAS) or SAN system, with no dropped frames. So you can save time in copying files and forget about having to pay twice for storage space.
Don’t worry about proprietary encoders and servers
It is not acceptable that you continuously have to pay for expensive proprietary encoders and servers that run the risk of losing support anytime soon. Wouldn’t it be great to have some way of ensuring interoperability between your systems, now and into the future?
iCR Mastering software is regularly updated and upgraded to the latest industry formats, which means that no matter what other systems you use, you will no longer have to perform major upgrades.
And iCR Mastering’s strong scripting capabilities can easily take care of backups or automatically load clips onto an FTP or website, improving your workflow.
Improve your efficiency
Paying qualified staff to sit in front of a system to manually ingest tapes is not efficient—or good for your bottom line. But with iCR Mastering’s automated control you only need a single operator to supervise the ingest of dozens of channels of video at a time.
iCR Mastering can even integrate with tape robots to give you a fully automated ingest operation that runs around the clock. Furthermore, it can easily be integrated with computer-based automation thanks to its service-oriented architecture.
Take note as you go along
Add value to your files at the encoding stage by getting iCR Mastering to help you with annotation. Its tools can be easily customized to your needs and will even pre-fill descriptor lists.
Plus it integrates with numerous media asset management systems so you can import metadata automatically from your existing databases, whether you are setting up an existing or new operation.
Save the value in your tape material
If you are saving your tape archives to file format masters then you obviously want to be assured that you are recording them at the best possible quality.
By adding the Review & QC application to your iCR platform, you can take advantage of a built-in quality control (QC) function, whereby iCR inspects your files as they are being ingested in order to guarantee that you will not find any surprises when you start using them.
Plus the Review & QC application gives you a QC report which is so complete that it can even serve as a ‘pedigree’ for your master file, to be stored on your media asset management system along with your content.
Automatically save low-bit-rate proxies
If you are farming out captioning or other activities, it pays to be able to provide editors, producers or other partners your content at a low bit-rate so you do not have to spend time and money sending large files.
iCR Mastering makes this easy by giving you the option of creating low bit-rate proxies of your masters automatically during ingest, with burnt-in time code included.
Save satellite feeds direct to disk storage
If you are currently recording satellite feeds to tape and having to re-encode them to disk storage later, then you will be glad to know there is a much more efficient way of dealing with this content.
With iCR Mastering you not only get standard definition and high definition serial digital interface (SDI) ingest but also pre-compressed asynchronous serial interface (ASI) MPEG-2 ingest, allowing you to store satellite feeds direct to disk.
Encode multiple versions of a master in one go
iCR Mastering can automatically convert and repurpose your masters as they are being ingested.
You need a standard definition version of a high definition tape? You need two different flavors to feed different non-linear editing systems? You need to create dailies or multiple proxy formats? No problem.
Just set iCR Mastering up once and it will all be taken care of automatically for you.
Make metadata easy
If you need to provide professional metadata for the broadcast market then iCR Mastering can ingest and repurpose vertical blanking information/vertical ancillary data space (VBI/VANC) to many different formats, saving you time and effort.
Benefits at a glance
| Benefit | iCR Mastering |
|---|---|
| Monetize your archive |  |
| Create a wide range of formats/wrappers | |
| Ingest direct to NAS/SAN | |
| Integrate into proprietary systems | |
| Automate annotation tasks | |
| Integrate QC into your mastering | |
| Provide low-bit-rate proxies | |
| Encode satellite feeds direct to storage | |
| Repurpose masters on ingest | |
| Repurpose VBI/VANC to different formats | |