Front Porch Digital Enhanced SAMMA Video Products

Front Porch Digital has enhanced the global versatility, interoperability, and functionality of the fourth generation of its SAMMA family of products for migrating media content from videotape to safe, secure, and readily accessible file-based formats. SAMMA V.4 core products – SAMMA Solo, SAMMA Robot, SAMMA Prep, and SAMMA Clean – will each debut new versions at the 2010 NAB Show.

             SAMMA Robot

"Media organizations around the world are waking up to the urgent necessity of saving their vulnerable videotape-based archives," said Mike Knaisch, Front Porch Digital president and CEO. "Now in its fourth generation, advanced SAMMA technology makes it easier than ever to perform high-volume migration of media assets from videotape to digital files, and to store, protect, access, retrieve, and manipulate them for repurposing later. Each year tens of thousands of hours of valuable videotape content is lost to decay, and it’s time for content owners to take action."

Leveraging a strong global presence in the media and entertainment industries, Front Porch Digital has invested significant R&D in technology to preserve legacy archive media content around the world. In recognition of this global need, the new SAMMA V.4 family of solutions adds full internationalization with local language support to all user interfaces.

The SAMMA Solo V.4 migration platform has also been enhanced to generate shot lists automatically for migrated videotape content based on configurable detection parameters including black, freeze-frame, silence, and color bars. At the same time, the migration process itself has been optimized to eliminate stopping and starting of the source VTR. Shot lists are preserved in the invaluable XML metadata generated with each asset and can also be automatically output to Apple XML or Avid ALE for subsequent trimming or content conforming. This new version of SAMMA Solo software also stores all collected migration metadata in a central database that supports multidimensional asset migration so that metadata gathered on repeat migrations of a single videotape asset is preserved for subsequent reports and queries.

Also offering significant enhancements over previous versions, Front Porch Digital’s SAMMA Robot V.4 accommodates automatic handling of mixed size (large/small) and mixed standard (PAL/NTSC) videotape cassettes; associates migration profiles on an individual or group videotape basis during the preparation process; and includes an enhanced user interface with additional robotic system status messaging and support for DVCam and DVCPro tape formats. For users who want to reuse legacy robotic systems to facilitate high-volume migration, Front Porch Digital has added Sony Flexicart VTR robotic system support.