Front Porch Digital Adds Unicode Support

Front Porch Digital will add user interface internationalization, including Unicode support, to its SAMMA family of products targeting media migration from vulnerable videotape to secure and readily accessible digital storage.

The Front Porch team demonstrated its SAMMA solutions, enhanced with the internationalized interfaces, at the IBC2009 Show, Sept. 11-15 in Amsterdam.

"According to industry estimates, there are more than a billion videotape cassettes storing rare or irreplaceable content in locations around the world," said Brian Campanotti, CTO of Front Porch Digital. "Obviously, the need for our technology extends beyond the English-speaking world. With media organizations and archives everywhere learning about the potential of the SAMMA product family, interest has taken off. In response, Front Porch is making these products even easier to use by providing a friendly interface, no matter what language the operator prefers."

At the heart of Front Porch’s advanced migration solution is SAMMA Solo, a turnkey, single-stream engine that simultaneously converts videotape in real time to as many as five high-quality digital files including MXF- or QuickTime-wrapped JPEG2000, MPEG-2, DV, H.264 (MPEG-4), Flash, MPEG-1, AVC, Windows Media, and Real Media while monitoring the entire process automatically and collecting critical quality metadata frame by frame.

Besides SAMMA Solo, Front Porch Digital’s SAMMA family includes SAMMA Prep, a simple human-workflow-centric videotape preparation and accessioning application; SAMMA Clean, with the ability to clean, process, assess, and prepare videotapes at rates about 20 times faster than real time while automatically collecting metadata; SAMMA Robot, an automated migration system that can operate around the clock and support up to 800 hours of content migration per week; and the free SAMMA J2K software player, which offers PC-based playback of industry-standard, preservation quality MXF-wrapped JPEG2000 content.