This summer, the northern world has experienced heat waves on a massive scale. Apart from the physical discomfort, there have been terrible cases of fire, floods, deaths and suffering. At Emotion, we have been suffering a different sort of heat….

Just prior to last IBC we spoke about the need for fine grain media services and the need for solutions that are modular, flexible, and agile. By that, what we mean is specialists and best of breed solutions that solve very, very specific needs. Dare we say niche?

So, our business, we felt, was in this space. But what we’ve experienced since last IBC is something entirely different and pleasantly unexpected. And that is, the same service that we provide, (high-quality, bespoke-tuned, and agile) but serious volume! And the need to fit into mainstream workflows. Luckily for us, our architecture was setup for the product to scale, and our agility allowed us to quickly create solutions that allowed redundancy and high availability.

Creating redundant configurations where Engine is wholly controlled by tools such as a MAM, Aspera, or Telestream Vantage are quite easy, as the control device will manage what has and has not been processed. In the event of failure, these external tools can redirect files to the backup system. A common configuration is where two Engines are used to share the workload and thereby ensuring that if one of the system fails, the other one continues and the work does not stop. Scalability is ensured by Engine’s ability to process up to 8 files at a time.

Last IBC our G&T evenings were very well received and we’re pleased to let you know that we will be doing a repeat of the same. But perhaps on a slightly larger scale ? We look forward to seeing you! We’d like to invite you to come and discuss your audio processing, scalability, and redundancy needs.

Click here to book a meeting with us at the show IBC Stand 6.C30

We all go to trade shows in the belief that customers with money will come and see us and order at the show. Whilst this has rarely been the case, almost all manufacturers and other show sages will tell you that it is the case.

At Emotion, we accepted that a long time ago. Shows are for us, generally marketing activities that we have to do, with questionable returns.

So, we share our marketing budget between shows and other activities. At shows, we recgonise that the right people are there but, we also realise that when our potential customers are there, we are competing for time. (…that is for those who are allowed to attend. When we used our mailer to ask, “Are you going to IBC?” The results came back as follows – 75% No, 25% yes and many of the 25% are manufacturers).

For the few that attend, we are fighting for their attention because, every year, there more exhibitors and so, we have to vie for attention – not easy when the customers are spending less time at the show – rarely do they spend 5 days at the show – most are there for a couple of days.

So, it was a pleasant and ironic surprise that this year, we actually did business whilst we were at IBC. The irony? Well, we did business with people who weren’t actually at IBC. Friday was a long call and demo to a customer in Australia (guess where I am next week), Friday evening was an urgent email from a French customer – please send me a quote ASAP. Saturday was a customer from NY, can we please talk because I want to buy your kit and I need to review the options. Monday was an hour and a half on the phone (from the booth) to close a significant deal. Thank god for internet and telephone

Now…. about the show…

Quite a few of our customers came to visit us, especially at our G&T evenings. So, useful and meaningful discussions were had; and yes, we also spoke about what we actually do – Files and Audio. Cloud deployments was a much talked about topic at IBC. We talked with broadcasters and people at playout facilities that are looking to migrate to the cloud. This is a large subject and it is clearly much more than processing Audio. We were pleased to be a small company that customers thought was important enough to have as a part of their cloud strategy. We have a lot of follow up discussions planned and we’d love to talk more to any of our customers who are looking to move to the cloud – we are fortunate enough to have some of our customers using Engine in the cloud and we look forward to providing innovative solutions in this area. We would love to hear about your experiences or needs – you can reply to this email if you want to share. Dolby Digital and Dolby Digital Plus was another favourite topic at the show. As our customers embrace file-based workflows in all areas, using DD and DD+ in files is becoming of interest and is also a challenge.

What’s your take on Dolby Digital Plus and will your facility be using it in 2018? That’s our IBC wrap up for you. Let me know if you’d like to talk or see a demo of Engine – let’s solve your audio processing, scalability, and redundancy needs.

We exhibited at SMPTE in Los Angeles; Dayna from postPerspective and SMPTE Live came by to interview us. We showed Eff – simple, automated CALM and loudness compliance for broadcasters. And we showed how post and playout facilities are using Engine to automate audio processing – channel shuffling, pitch shifting, and our new Dolby Digital Plus processing.

Dayna:

Hello, we are live here at SMPTE 2018. Very happy to have you with us this afternoon on day two of the conference, thank you for being with us Cindy.

Cindy:

Hey, Dayna, thank you so much.

Dayna:

And this is going to be for folks who, couldn’t make it to the conference but want to see who’s exhibiting. Can you maybe give them a little overview of Emotion Systems?

Cindy:

Yes, at Emotion Systems, we’re working with people who have MXF or MOV files, where the finished file is done and then you need to make a change to the audio. So maybe you need to get in adjust the file so it’s calm compliant, or shuffle channels, or do some pitch adjustment, that kind of thing.

Dayna:

Great and do you know how long the company’s been around?

Cindy:

Yes, five-plus years at this point.

Dayna:

Okay, very exciting. And what do you guys have on display? What are you exhibiting here at the show?

Cindy:

So we have two things. One is Eff. And so that software is especially for broadcasters, folks who find, “Hey, I’m not calm compliant on my promos. I’ve got spots that need the audio normalized, that kind of thing.” So super simple, nice, automated system for calm and loudness compliant so that’s one of them.

Dayna:

Great and the second one?

Cindy:

So if you like the first one, the second one is even more awesome, Dayna. It’s Engine – it takes your finished files and then you can do your shuffling audio… and new for this show, we have Dolby Digital Plus, so we’ve got the encoding and decoding here, and that’s brand new. Pitch shifting’s been really popular with people who are doing standards conversion, film that type of thing. And then we end up working with people at Smoke and Mirrors, the Mill, Turner, and other play-out, post, and broadcast facilities or hubs that need to do audio processing.

Dayna:

Okay. Great. Well thank you Cindy for joining us this afternoon and that’s all. Saying good bye from SMPTE Live 2018.

Come by and talk with me at the HPA Innovation Zone in Feb! You can see Loudness and other solutions including Loudness for Netflix. (Are you interested in Loudness for Netflix – let us know!)

See it for yourself at HPA:

1. Solving duration-based Loudness for files with PCM and Dolby E (MX1)
2. Repackaging QuickTime MOV files with two MOOV atoms (Premiere Digital Services)
3. Creating a UHD/ATMOS workflow with guard band correction of MXF files containing Dolby ED2
4. Canal+ have MXF files that contain Dolby E encoded audio descriptor (commentary) tracks, and these have to be replaced with different commentary to suit the target language. (Canal+)
5. Cloud and on prem demonstrations (Honeycomb)
6. Redundant configurations for file-based audio processing where Engine is wholly controlled by tools such as a MAM, Aspera, or Telestream Vantage.

Do you have a particular audio issue you need to solve? Is there something you wish you could do, but haven’t found a way yet? If you have problems that you wish to share and discuss with us, we’d love to hear them and work with you to come up with a solution. Let me know!

See you at HPA 2019,

MC

Let’s talk about what’s happening with audio processing, loudness compliance, and file manipulation in your facility. If you have a particular audio issue you need to solve or if there something you wish you could do but haven’t found a way yet, let us talk. We can work with you to come up with a solution.

Visit NABSHOW Express

All over the world media is being created for global market consumption and that media needs to be versioned for multiple languages and delivery platforms. The implications for audio are that there are multiple Loudness compliance standards for each of these platforms. Europe uses EBU R128, North America uses ATSC A/85, Australia uses OP59, and so on.

With the rise of Netflix and their user base and global reach, it became evident to us through engagement with the PLoud discussion group that Netflix had created a notably different loudness standard.

If you’re looking to deliver content to Netflix and want to be sure it’s within acceptable loudness limits, read on to learn about the company’s specifications, why those specifications are important, and how you can adapt your workflow to simplify audio measurement and compliance.

The Netflix specs for loudness are important for one simple reason: Netflix won’t accept files with an audio mix that does not conform to its average overall loudness specification. Netflix will check levels on receipt of a title, and thus the responsibility for ensuring compliance falls on the mixing studio that prepares audio for that title.

Netflix has written an audio specification that’s designed to help engineers and studios mix content to achieve particular loudness targets in their deliverables. In many cases, however, mixing facilities already have a completed mix, and what they need is a smooth, reliable, and fast way of measuring loudness and understanding how audio must be adjusted in order to match the Netflix profile.

Audio doesn’t get remixed once the creative work is finished. Our tools allow you to take that single mix and provide deliverables to any loudness standard.

You can download The Guide to Audio Compliance for Netflix Content and learn more about how to establish a quick, easy workflow for delivering content that matches Netflix requirements.

“Hey, if we want to deliver to a broadcaster and Netflix and Apple, how do we do this with full compliance and no loss of quality?”

Over the last few years, trade shows have become very challenging. If the exhibitors are like restaurants in a food festival and the visitors are the customers, ask yourself this question? If the percentage of restaurants are increasing faster the percentage of visitors, and the visitors are spending less time (very few spend all 5 days – most are there for a day or two), and the cost of being there keeps going up, how can we be successful? Especially, even if your fare is of exceptional quality, it may not be as mainstream as the 400 item menu that some of the larger stands offer.

So, we book appointments and do our mailers and to try and make sure we get our share of visitors, but this strategy only works for people we know. Surely, we are there for the “new” customers. Enter our G&T event at the end of the day… This rant is just a moan about the frustration of trade shows. I guess people want to hear about the show itself.

Despite the fact that we do offer some popular beverages on our IBC stand, besides our products, of course, we have seen fewer and fewer walk-ons in recent times. So, it was refreshing and encouraging this year to get a surge of interest above and beyond the appointments we had scheduled. Here’s a bit of what was discussed all throughout the show…

Deploying Loudness and associated audio processes is still a major concern. Visitors to our stand were interested primarily in loudness for broadcast, loudness for social media, on-prem, as well as cloud deployment. Along with loudness, automating a number of audio processes, such as upmixing and audio encoding, were also hot points of discussion.

We know that, in terms of addressing loudness for broadcast, the conventional method of keeping the average correct (as exemplified by a hardware processor) has been unsatisfactory, often compromising the quality of the mix and offering no satisfactory solution for online delivery. Audio, like the need for high dynamic range (HDR) and high resolution (4K, 8K) video, is becoming a significant consumer driver. At long last, traditional broadcasting is meeting its match with credible and increasing number of online delivery platforms.

Broadcast and online delivery platforms pose challenges for delivering audio. The specifications are already out there, and many more media companies are looking at how they can improve their approach to loudness. However, the expertise in delivering loudness compliance with high quality has proven challenging. And this is where we make our contribution, by working closely with our clients and helping them deliver high-quality audio to varied and exacting specifications.

Interest in loudness for social media and OTT platforms has increased dramatically. We noticed people at IBC saying, “Hey, if we want to deliver to a broadcaster and Netflix and Apple, how do we do this with full compliance and no loss of quality?” All of the multiplatform issues that were present but ignored 10 years ago have become a reality. Now OTT content providers are truly credible competitors for ad revenue traditionally monopolized by broadcasters. And therefore, content providers are demanding that audio is suitable for the platforms.

The original audio master has to be compliant to broadcast standards, and versions of it have to be created to be suitable for the online platforms where the listening environment (planes, trains, coffee shops…) is a lot noisier than the typical living room.

This is where we believe we can offer critical efficiency and cost savings – without compromising audio quality in meeting the delivery spec. Sure, someone could actually go into Pro Tools and create 40 different versions, but it would be a waste of time, talent, and money. So, we envision a scenario in which our automated audio processing tools use a single piece of content to deliver every version needed to accommodate broadcast, social, and OTT platforms.

It is not enough to feel satiated by stodgy fast and comfort food. High-quality fare with all the fast-food convenience is becoming more important for a lot of our customers.

That’s where we see things going, and we were pleasantly surprised that in spite of being the Restaurant at the End of the Universe (or was it a bar, or was it a booth?), we were busy and our customers ate heartily and left happy. And the G&T went down well.

Handling a large volume of incoming audio files in a variety of flavors can be a significant challenge for any playout facility, but it’s a particular problem in the event of consolidation or rapid growth.

The large-scale playout operations serving today’s commercial broadcasters made the shift from tapeless to file-based operations quite some time ago. Now, however, many are seeing a sufficient volume of file-based content that they must also update their strategy for processing incoming audio files. There is a simple solution; use the Emotion audio processing Engine to automate handling of incoming files, adjusting for loudness and other requirements. This approach makes the whole workflow far more efficient and cost-effective than trying to use multiple edit suites.

For a recent 100+ channel playout facility we provided two Engines, each capable of processing eight files at a time. An advantage of using two Engines is that you now have built-in processing redundancy and backup, should a workstation fail. With this setup, files arrive in different flavors, and the Engines adjust the audio according to a series of preset workflows configured for the requirement.

Our processing modules are designed to maintain the creative mix whilst providing loudness correction. If you’ve done a creative mix then you want to do as little processing as possible to make it comply. However, a specialist LRA module also exists for taking theatrical mixes and making them suitable for broadcast.

Dolby E encoding, track mapping, and removal/addition of audio channels are just a few of the other options that can be built into Engine’s processing workflow so that the resulting audio file is ready for transmission.

We’re hearing from customers that, by using a processing Engine to automate normalization and other requirements prior to playout, they are significantly increasing the efficiency of their workflows. It’s a simple solution to a common problem. Moreover, with the ability to scale up processing in the future, playout facilities can readily address further increases in the number of audio files they need to handle.

So, why do customers choose us? The reason they go with Emotion is not only do we provide cost efficiency and flexibly, but we also provide a wide range of high-quality audio processing modules that facilitate automated workflows. And lastly, as one of the customers told us just recently, “You have a superb and responsive support team.”

You can get your trial of Engine here.

Do you ever see one of your news stories or promos go out and realize loudness wasn’t checked or corrected properly?

Even if you have hardware-based audio compliance sitting on your output, issues with loudness can still arise. Watch this webinar replay “Loudness for News and Promos,” from Emotion Systems to discover how to implement more reliable and consistent loudness monitoring and correction.

Rich Hajdu:

Welcome to the webinar on loudness for news and promos. It’s a big issue because a lot of people do news segments and the audio goes out to the playout server and it’s not really loudness controlled.

I’m Rich Hajdu with Media Technology Group. MC Patel, the CEO of Emotion Systems, is going to be doing most of the presentation. We invite you to use the chat to send us questions and we’ll answer them.

MC, the issue is that loudness for news and promos is not regulated in many instances because people don’t have time to check the loudness when the news clip is edited. So it goes to the playout server and then it goes directly to playout. When it’s time goes through a playlist and all that. So there is a loudness corrector at the output of the station. Why isn’t that enough?

MC Patel:

The best thing is for me to quickly explain loudness. Now, most people will be familiar with it, but I’ll explain it very shortly and succinctly, and that will help you understand why we do the file-based loudness correction. Historically, ever since television has been around, we have used peak-based measurement. What we basically do is say, “What is the loudest or the highest peak in television?” That’s integrated in different countries at different time constants. In the US you guys use VU. In Europe, we use PPMs, but fundamentally what we say is that the sound shall not exceed a certain peak. In the old days, the reason for that was that in NTSC, the audio sat right at the end of the chroma subcarrier, so if the sound got too loud, it interfered in the transmitter and distorted the color.

That’s where the peaking came about. As you know, in the seventies, people discovered that whilst you weren’t supposed to exceed a peak, if you stayed very close to it, your commercials could be very, very loud, which is how the loud commercials came about. Over the years, people got fed up with it and said, “we want some balance in the content, we want dynamics, but we also want to make sure there aren’t sustained bursts of loudness.” So the new standard called “program loudness” came about — in America it’s called the CALM Act, but the standard is ATSC A/85. It said that the average level of a piece of content may not exceed a certain amount in LUFS. It’s minus 24 in the case of the US, and then the second parameter that’s important is the true peak. So the true peak may not exceed minus one or minus two, which varies depending on countries and standards.

When people used to mix to peaks, it was easy. They could see a peak on their PPM meters, and they came along and said, “Yeah, I’ve got my audio right.” When you have to measure to average level, that’s kind of hard because you don’t know what the average is till you get to the end. So when all this came about, there were a bunch of hardware correctors that you could put on the output of your master control and say, “All the content that I’ve been producing for all these years is great. And the hardware corrector will take care of the loudness.” Now, remembering that the average is what matters, the hardware corrector doesn’t know when a program has begun and when a program has ended.

So the hardware corrector is saying, “Over the last few seconds, whatever I’ve seen, I’ll keep it very close to minus 24.” So if you have a few seconds of silence, it says, “Oh, dear, my average is going to fall below minus 24.” It will raise the gain of that. And if you have a lot of very loud noises, it lowers it. Now that’s modulating the audio, and that can cause problems.

If we go back to the promos and the news, the important thing that Rich said is that in a promo, in a local edit suite, you may not have the loudness measurement capability, or that people still mix with their ears for promos or anything. And one of the nice things is if you mix with your ears and you’ve been trained, you will naturally mix to 24, or in Europe we think it should be 23, or thereabouts. So the mix will be good.

And that’s the other important thing: If you spend time creating a mix, you don’t want to destroy it in the correction process. For news, unfortunately, as we know, the news comes in, you’ve got some background noise. If you’re by a freeway, it will be really noisy background. If you have a quiet area, it could be really quiet. Then you have the people talking. And you’re not sure what the levels are going to be, when it comes there and it gets edited. And as Rich so rightly said, there isn’t time to take care of that. So what you’re relying on is the hardware processor to take care of it. Am I’m making sense so far?

Rich Hajdu:

Yeah. So the hardware processor isn’t really set up to do that. The question is, I’m editing news and it’s fast-paced, I don’t have time to manually intervene and check audio levels and all that. What’s an elegant solution to do that, that is settable, repeatable, and reliable? What’s the solution?

MC Patel:

There are a number of approaches. You can use a plugin in the edit suite, but as we already said, we don’t want to do that because the focus should be on getting the right piece of the video there and out. When we approached this problem, our initial focus was commercials. A lot of people came up and said, “Hey, we don’t want to be fined.” And the creative mix was important. A lot of the post houses said, “We don’t touch the audio because if we mess up the audio, our clients will get upset.” Bearing in mind that what we’re interested in is the average, what we say is we measure the average. Now in a file, you know the beginning, you know the end. So that would be applicable to a news clip or a promo clip, right? So what we do is we do two passes.

The first pass is we measure, then we say, “Oh, it should be minus 24. I am at minus 26.” So what we say is, “If you apply gain across the whole clip or two DBs, you’ll get to minus 24.” It’s a very simple algorithm. It’s volume control. Now, if you lifted the audio, then you may have a peak error because your peak’s not supposed to go above minus one. So what we do when we’re measuring it, we identify where the peaks are, we create a gate around it, and then the software attenuates inside the gate to make sure it doesn’t exceed the minus one. And then it does a little mix in, mix out with the main content. So it’s a very simple concept.

So you ask, “How do I do this?” Well, once we’ve established the parameters that the correction should be at minus 24, and the peak should not exceed minus two or minus three, different countries have slightly different standards, you set those up and then the software just takes care of it. You do a measurement pass, you do the correction pass.

In order to do this quickly, it doesn’t sit in the edit suite. The product can sit in there, but what we’ve got is a watch folder, or a hot folder as you might call them. We say the output of the edit suite gets posted into the hot folder, our product is looking at the hot folder. As soon as it receives the file, it measures it, it corrects it, and it puts the corrected file into a folder of your choice. So that could be your transmission server folder.

Rich Hajdu:

And how long does that take?

MC Patel:

Okay, so a 30-second file. Typically the software runs at three to five times faster than real time. So you’re talking if it’s five times, six seconds.

Rich Hajdu:

Right.

MC Patel:

And it’ll take us slightly longer because we watch the file to make sure that it stopped growing because when you’re copying a file into the watch folder, but other than that, it’s faster than real time. And depending on your setup, you can do this. So in the newsroom environment, it’s entirely feasible to make this happen and not worry about the audio side.

Rich Hajdu:

Yeah, because those clips are typically only 20 seconds, 30 seconds, a minute. In the US, if it’s a two minute clip, that’s a long clip. So that’s not going to add much time to it. Right?

MC Patel:

And you would have some time for the promos. So you could either do them manually, or again, you can have another watch folder or hot folder and do it that way.

Rich Hajdu:

So, okay, I’m going to do this. What is the actual physical implementation? In other words, I need a PC… what do I need from a hardware and software standpoint?

MC Patel:

The software’s cross-platform, first of all, and that’s important. So we can run on a Mac, on a Linux or on Windows. Depending, for example, it can be on the same PC or workstation as your edit software, the watch folder may be somewhere, but this can run on there. So you basically say, “Oh, we’re a Mac place. Can you run on Mac?” Yes, you can run on Mac. And it’s a standalone piece of software. It’s very easy to install. The installer comes with it. You download it from our website and it guides you through the installation.

We let people try this out, because if people have a concern that this may not be fast enough, or we’re not sure about the quality, what we say is, “Download it from our website and play with it.” If you need a little bit of help, we’re happy to help you set it up and so on. The correction profile for the US is a part of a library of profiles that are supplied with the application. So you don’t even need to set that up. You just select it and you’re done.

Rich Hajdu:

You talked about running your Emotion Eff software on the same PC that’s used for editing, whether it’s Adobe, Grass Valley, Avid, whatever it is. What if I have eight edit stations? Would I run that software on each one? Or would the watch folder be located on a central PC somewhere else?

MC Patel:

We have clients who do both. Obviously it costs money. If you’re doing a news spot, you would be doing half a dozen spots or whatever, right? So there’s no reason for everyone to have one of these. We’d love them to have it, but from a practical point of view, you can have a dedicated workstation and have a watch folder in there. And that takes care of it.

Now the computer doesn’t need a very beefy spec either because we’re only processing audio. Now we do read the file with the video in it, and we do write out a file with video in it. We do all the extraction, everything inside the software. So if you have it on a fast network, the network’s important, but in the lab, we have $500 PCs that take care of this.

Rich Hajdu:

So it’s a simple setup. Everybody in news is editing fast, they’re doing this and that. Once you set it up and it’s working, it’s a set-it-and-forget-it type of situation. Is that correct?

MC Patel:

Yes, it is. To give you some idea of the robustness of the product, we have two products really. The focus today is on what we call our desktop product, Eff, and we have another protocol, the Engine, that’s running pretty much identical code, but it’s designed to offer really, really high throughput. So we have clients processing 10,000 hours a month of content for retransmission. So all the episodic stuff, the movies and things that go out. If you have a playout center that says, “I have 50, 60, 100 channels, and all the content needs to be loudness compliant,” we have that going through the system. And that works day in, day out. It’s a very stable piece of software, and you wouldn’t have to have concerns about that.

Rich Hajdu:

If I install this software, I downloaded it, I installed it. Are you there to help me through the installation, answer questions, all of that?

MC Patel:

Absolutely. Now, whilst we are in England, if you give us team rear access, we can take care of the stuff. We can do online training in the same way. Iain, my partner, does all the support. This morning Red Bee France was doing a software upgrade, which they did themselves. They just wanted a bit of housekeeping check, so they gave our team rear access. Those guys are doing 2,000 hours a month. We have a call tomorrow in India where they want to set up the same idea. They are a sports channel, or they have lots of stuff, but they’re using us to correct the commercials that they put in, in between the sports. Obviously there isn’t a lot of live sports at the moment, but all the commercials and promos there go through this. So we’re helping with their setup because they have instances where they’re trying to deal with a 5.1 and Dolby E for transmission, which may not be the case in the US.

Rich Hajdu:

Right. And what kind of analytics are available?

MC Patel:

When we did this automated piece of software, people said, “How do I know what you’ve done? And give me some feedback.” If you’re doing it without the watch folder, if you’re doing a one-in, one-out, which I can show you in a second, the software draws a graph for you, and it gives you all the measurements. If you are doing it within the watch folder, you could set it to give you a PDF report. And within the report, it will tell you whether the file passed or failed, what it measured, what the graphs were, and so on. It’s very comprehensive in that. Now in your promos and things, if you have bars and tone, we can literally detect the tone and ignore it. So there’s a fair degree of flexibility.

Rich Hajdu:

Once the system is easy to install, it doesn’t require a lot of hardware. It’ll work on a network, doesn’t require a costly PC. It runs in the background, and it has analytics and it can be expanded. This is an important point. If you have another five edit bays, or you want to do more promos, or if you got into production, you could upgrade from Eff to Engine, so it’s a scalable system.

MC Patel:

Yes, it’s scalable.

I forgot to give you some background. We are Emotion Systems and we’ve been in this business for about 10 years. We used to sell some QC software whilst we were doing some other things. And a lot of our customers kept saying to us, “This QC stuff is really good. It tells me what’s wrong with a file, but there’s no opportunity, so what do I do about it?”

At the same time we’re doing this, people started talking to us about loudness. We thought, “Ah, this is interesting because there isn’t an easy solution of how to fix it loudness-wise.” So our first product was to build the measurement of loudness and correction of it. And the algorithm I described a few minutes ago is what we use. We’ve refined it a little bit, but fundamentally, that’s what we do. And then the company evolved to say, “Well, if you can do loudness and you’ve got the audio out, you can do more with it.” And that’s how the company’s grown. So the flexibility and the scalability came about, because once we did this, Dolby came to us and said, “What happens if the file’s got Dolby E? Can you measure the loudness in Dolby E and correct it?” And we licensed the stuff from them and made that.

And then Red Bee Media, about six or seven years ago, came to us and said, “We’re doing a playout center. We want to do loudness correction. We want to do channel mapping because our tracks are in the wrong place, etc.” So we built a system for them that could process 2,000 hours a month. But the desktop product has been around. It runs the same loudness code as the main Engine. So people often say we have the Eff, but now our needs have grown, and we’ll do an upgrade of the Eff into Engine. We do a trade-in, basically.

Rich Hajdu:

Right. And you have customers all over the world, and you have US customers also, correct?

MC Patel:

Yes, we do. We have some call letter stations that use Eff. We have a PBS station that does that. I won’t name them because I don’t have permission. There are very large content-repurposing houses, some of whom I can name, who, basically when Hollywood sells content to the rest of the world and locally, they want to create multiple versions of the same content. So we have companies like Vubiquity, Premiere Digital. Viacom’s a very big customer of ours. Viacom in New York has a massive system where a lot of their content goes through our system for loudness correction, pitch shifting, and a whole lot of other things.

Rich Hajdu:

MC, we don’t want to take too long here, but can we do a quick demo so we can see what this looks like?

MC Patel:

So what we have here is the product Eff. I’m going to show you the manual version. Let’s do a quick file measurement run.

We won’t go through the settings because I’ve already described most of it. All you’re doing is asking, “What is the correction I want?” So this is our CALM. I’ve got a Deluxe. I was doing a demo for them in Australia. Rich, when I did the demo for you. I have a Netflix profile, right? Now this is my demo system. When you get it, you actually get more than that, but we want to do CALM. I select a source. So this is a file already corrected.

Rich Hajdu:

Okay. Yeah. We just need to see the basics of what Eff does.

MC Patel:

So there you go. So what it’s done is it says the audio duration was 25 seconds at the top. And it measured it 19 times faster than real time. The analysis time was 1.3 seconds. Now this is a corrected file. So it says this group does not require any correction.

If it did require correction, I just press the correct button there and we’re done. And you can see that I’ve got a graph which says I have silence for the first seven seconds. And then the program loudness goes up like that. I can look at the true peak. It shows me where my true peaks are, and I can look at the log of these as well. So I can turn the logs on and it gives me a list where my peaks are.

Rich Hajdu:

So in a news editing situation, would the files that have been corrected be there?

MC Patel:

We’ve got a source and we can say, “Where do I want to put the destination?” Right. So I select the destination. Now I’ve actually just shown a corrected file, but it’s really as straightforward as that.

Rich Hajdu:

And so when I set that up and then as long as the destination doesn’t change, I set this up once.

MC Patel:

Correct. So I am doing this manually up here. That’s the manual operation. There is a watch folder operation. If you select the watch folder, then you can post files into a watch folder right from the system. Have I covered enough, Rich?

Rich Hajdu:

Yeah. I think you have. The point is it’s not a complicated, complex setup that takes days to set up and days to learn. Somebody gets this file and you guys help them. They can be on the road right away.

MC Patel:

The idea here is, this is an audio product that is designed for a video environment. So we assume that if the person doesn’t understand video, we’d take care of it.

You need a bit of trust. So we want you to try it out and get your audio people and the golden ears to listen to it and say, “Is this okay?” And then you’re good to go.

Rich Hajdu:

That’s the key, because an audiophile is different from somebody who’s concentrated on news. And really audio is just a secondary element that happens.

MC Patel:

That’s correct. So what we’re saying is, you focus on the creative stuff, do your job, and leave us to do the compliance.

Rich Hajdu:

Right. And they can download this file from your website, or they can go to my website and access the download and they can contact us. And it’s that easy. Just download it, try it out, and see if it works. We don’t want to get into pricing exactly. But let’s say I’ve got eight edit suites and this is not a $100,000 system, right?

MC Patel:

No, it’s not. It’s a few thousand dollars, depending on the configuration.

Rich Hajdu:

It’s in that price range. So it’s not going to be a budget buster either. And it is going to give somebody the continuity of audio without the highs and the lows and without all the other things that interfere with the viewer response.

MC Patel:

That’s correct. So we have some questions coming along. Cristian asked, what about live transmission? Basically, this product is not designed for live transmission. This product is really designed for file-based content. As I mentioned earlier for live content, we don’t know where the beginning of the program is and the end of the program. So we’ve left that part alone. We see so much content that is file-based that we saw an opportunity to make a product specifically for file-based content.

Rich Hajdu:

Cindy has posted in the chat box how you can download a demo version. And again, you can contact either one of us, me in the States and MC in the rest of the world, and we’ll be glad to answer any questions. Try the demo and make sure that you feel comfortable with the solution to an ongoing problem.

MC Patel:

We have a question from Europe, which is that you may want to preserve the archive as was originally mixed and then that archive may get distributed a number of times. A lot of our customers will do, I wouldn’t necessarily call it the correction, but the compliance to whatever the client needs. So for example, if you have something in your archive that has… I know we’re digressing slightly from the news and promo…

Rich Hajdu:

That’s okay. We’ve covered that.

MC Patel:

If you have something from the archive and you wanted to send it to Netflix, for example, Netflix has a completely different standard from the broadcasters. So this product is very often used for producing content for Netflix or for Amazon Alexa.

Yesterday I was talking to some people who said, “We have a completely different audio requirement for Alexa. If I already have a hardware processor, why do I need this?” And as I mentioned earlier, what’s happening to most hardware processors is they’re programmed to make sure that the long form content is compliant. So the time constant that it reacts to are over long term changes. And that’s also true for live. So for live, you have quiet moments, really loud moments, quiet moments, really loud moments. And it could be a three-hour, well, if you watch cricket, it’s an eight-hour show, but like a baseball game, I guess it’s many hours, right?

So the processors are really set for that. When you have a 30-second, 45-second promo, you really want the promo to be bang on in the range so the hardware doesn’t try to overcorrect it or undercorrect it.

Another question is API integration. The product that I briefly showed you, Eff, is a desktop product. It’s got a little bit of automation in it, but it doesn’t really go beyond that. If you need API and so on, then the product to look at is the Engine which has 16 different audio processing modules. It can process up to eight files at a time. It’s a very, very comprehensive system designed for scaling and automation, and we have a REST API for it. And what happens with a REST API is that you could basically say, “Take this file, apply this workflow to it and send it to this position or this destination.”

It’s as simple as that. Once you’re doing it, you can do the status of the file in terms of how much you’ve processed it and so on. So there’s a question on latency and delay. In this instance, there is no delay or latency because it’s software — what we’re doing is we’re taking the audio out of the file. We’re measuring it, we’re correcting and putting it exactly back where it was. So there’s no video, audio time constraints. In hardware, there may be a different approach to that.

Rich Hajdu:

In the chat box, there’s also an area where you can download the Loudness Factbook, which is really, really excellent. I’m not an audio expert, I’ve spent my time in television. And the Loudness Factbook is really good because it gives you a great primer on loudness in all its attributes and all of that.

MC Patel:

We have a question which says, “If someone is doing a poor job with the audio track, can you fix it?” Now what we have to ask ourselves is, what is a poor job? I often describe this as, if you think about music, I could say the mix on this music is bad, but the artist created it. So we try and preserve that. But if what you call bad is the audio levels are too low, I can’t hear the dialogue, etc., when you normalize the file, because it’s applying that overall gain, you can actually do a few things to it. In fact, that’s what we’re saying for the newsroom. Generally, the problem is people do know how to talk, but sometimes they have to shout because they have to get above the ambient level. And we can normalize that so that is better, but it is literally a gain control.

I have a question from Bogdan. Does it correct loudness on Dolby E streams? And the answer is if you buy the option, it does. Bogdan, I assume you’re in Europe at the moment because we use Dolby E quite a lot. The Red Bee example I use for playout does have Dolby E. So some of the files come transmission-ready. They already have Dolby E and if you want to say, “Is the loudness in that stream correct?”, we decode it, measure it, correct it, and resend it.

This is also applicable in the US if you have to deliver content for someone like Direct TV. You may deliver it as transport stream with Dolby digitally encoded, or MP3 in case of Comcast. And then you say, “I’ve sent it, but is it correct after the encoding process?”

We have done a system like this for a large content creator, where we take the file and we decode the Dolby Digital, loudness-measure it, correct it, recode it, and give it back. Now the important thing here is if you’re the guy who has to send the file out, you may not have the skills to do this and you sure as hell won’t have the kit to do it. So this is like, “I have to send it out and now to make sure it’s okay.” We provide that capability.

Rich, have I covered everything for the news?

Rich Hajdu:

Yes, MC, very productive. Because again, we needed to know about the simplicity, how it works, the repeatability, the reliability, and basically what we’ve discovered in this webinar is that it’s a simple system to install. It’s a simple system to use. It’s repeatable. Set it and forget it, and it’s not too expensive. So I think that’s everything we need to know. If anybody has any questions, they can address MC or me and we’ll be glad to answer them.

MC Patel:

Once again, as you mentioned the Loudness Factbook is something we wrote to help people understand it with all the issues. There is a discussion in there about the hardware versus software, where it’s applicable, why you should do one or the other. We are always happy to discuss specific needs. Just drop us an email on . And you can go onto the website at emotion-systems.com. Every single page on our website has a big button that says “Download a trial” and click on it and you can download the software. We’d love to work with you.

Rich Hajdu:

Great. If that’s it, then we’ll close it for now. And thanks for everyone’s participation. It’s been very enjoyable.

MC Patel:

Yeah. Thank you for your time, gentlemen. Thank you.

The media industry is changing quickly, and it can be hard to keep up with changes in standards, regulations, and practices surrounding loudness.

Get up to speed quickly! Watch the webinar replay to learn about:

• Must-know specifications and requirements
• Loudness in different playback environments
• Lesser-known specifications around online delivery
• How to implement loudness processing to optimize audio quality
• What you need to know and ensure compliance for global distribution

Cindy:

Welcome everybody. We’re so glad you’re here. And today we’re looking at new loudness challenges in broadcast, online, and cinema. So today you’re going to hear about loudness challenges and the history of loudness a little bit, and the challenges we’ve come up against in the current day. And we’ll look at the delivery process and also what’s happening with loudness for online and yeah, it’s going to be a great day. So hi MC.

MC:

Oh, hi Cindy. So yeah, thank you for hosting this. And this is our fourth webinar in the summer and we hope to do some more. This particular one, we’re going to focus on loudness. A number of our customers gave us feedback that, whilst it’s great that we do all these different types of audio processing, this is, I wouldn’t say necessarily back to fundamentals, but it is talking much more about loudness.

MC:

So I’m going to start by just talking about, just an introduction to loudness, what is loudness? How it came about and so on. And then we’ll move on to some other things. So basically a bit of history, when television started and we obviously had video and audio, we used to use a technique where we measured the peak audio level to determine what was the highest peak you could get. And there were a number of reasons for it. It was a very crude, but very effective way of measuring how loud the loudest bit would be. And from the analog transmission days, you didn’t want the level to go above a certain amount because we used frequency modulation for the audio, and if you deviated the frequency too much, it interfered with the video. So that’s why it was limited.

MC:

And that practice worked very well. The whole industry evolved and developed around it. Of course there were different standards around the world as to what peaks are. In the UK we had the BBC standard. There were several EU versions, there was a Nordic one, in America we had the volume unit meter, and so on. But in the 80s, people realized that, commercials people especially realized that whilst you weren’t supposed to exceed this peak, you could stay pretty close to it and the result was your commercial was a lot louder than the rest of the program, which I think everyone who watched television knows how irritating it is that people thought it was creative, but it was really irritating.

Cindy:

It’s true. It would be so tough. You’re watching and then just bam.

MC:

Bang. Yeah. And also there was no control if you switch channels, which wasn’t a problem in the old days, but when you have 200 channels, as you switch between channels, if the audio levels are not quite right, you get a sudden jump in audio and not a good experience. And the other thing was that when people made this constantly loud audio, it meant that we lost the dynamics in the audio. Everything was just loud and compressed. So the engineers around the world, the audio engineers in television world had been working on a loudness standard for a number of years. And actually it was about 10 years ago that they came up with the specification. That specs has been evolving since then and it’s 10 years ago, we got into the business.

MC:

So very briefly, program loudness or loudness, there are five measurements that we look at and care about. The first one is true peak, which is actually the highest value that the wave form can achieve. And that’s important because you don’t want the true peak to go into clipping in a system. And if you put compression in audio downstream, then you want to limit the amount of peaking because when you compress it, you will create clipping as a result of the compression process. So -3DBs is a good value for true peak.

MC:

Then the basis of loudness measurement comes out of a block of integration that you do on the audio. There’s a 400 millisecond block, and one 400 millisecond block forms the basis of momentary loud. So that tells you in a short time what the highest audio level is. If you take that average over three seconds, that gives you what we call short term loudness. And then if you take it for the duration of the loudness period, you get program loudness.

MC:

Now the problem loudness is slightly more complicated than just the total average, because in order to get a representative value, they wanted to take out the periods of silence, absolute silence. So if the audio goes to total silence, that measurement block is ignored. And there’s a few more complicated versions of it, which people can read about in our loudness fact book that you can get off our website.

Cindy:

That’s true-

MC:

But those are the… Sorry, go ahead.

Cindy:

Oh, I was going to let you clear your throat there or grab a water for a second and just say that, yes, we do have the loudness fact book for you. And there’s a link for you in the chat. But back to you MC on your five parameters. Yeah.

MC:

Yeah. So, the full parameters are true peak, momentary, short term, program loudness, and then we have loudness range. And loudness range is an attempt to describe the dynamic range in a program. Now you don’t want to look at the absolute values because there will always be silence and there will always be a true peak. So you take the measurements that you’ve done as a part of the integration. And then if you do a histogram and you only measure the top 95 percentile and the bottom 10 percentile, then that range of audio that you get is described as loudness range.

MC:

Now, to give you some examples, a really wide high dynamic range would be something like Mission Impossible. It’s a very noisy film, lots of bullets going on, guns, explosions, fast moving, and so on. And then you have others where that may be a lot less. So if you have a mostly dialogue film or a general TV series, like say Friends, there’s not a lot of dynamics in it. Friends, I’d describe as dialogue, a door slam, and a bit of piano music. So not a lot of dynamics.

MC:

But if you look at some of the more recent episodics as he CIS, or, I don’t watch those things, but they have a lot more dynamics and with 5.1 and so on. So loudness range is a measure of that dynamics. And why is that important? It’s important because it helps you understand how that audio will sound in different listening environments. And so in a cinema where you’re seeing them for 90 minutes or something, then you can enjoy that wide dynamic and live with it. If Mission Impossible was in your living room for eight hours a day, that would be kind of painful and not so enjoyable. And then as we’ll talk about later, if you have online delivery where your listening environment is noisier than normal, then the audio has to be a little bit louder and a little bit less dynamic so that you can actually have a good listening experience. So, that in a nutshell is program loudness.

Cindy:

Got it. So the peak measurement system of old has really changed. And so if I got this right, the parameters that now matter are true peak and program loudness, short term loudness, momentary loudness, and then you were talking about LRA, the loudness range. So changed from days of old.

MC:

That’s correct. Yeah. Now why have so many measurements? So if we talk now about the production process, when you’re doing a production process, the audio engineer has what we call a sound budget. So the budget goes along line, if I’m mixing a 90 minute movie, then I want to make sure that I am at a program loudness level, I manage the LRA based on the environment I’m trying to deliver to, and then I also want to know what my short term and my momentary peaks are just, so that you get an idea. Now, this is a purely mental process. You can’t see it across the whole program, but you use these tools to plan certain things. If you want to make an impact, you may look more at the momentary loudness. If you want to have a short burst of something, you will look at the short term loudness and so on.

MC:

So in production, these tools are used, but they’re used in your edit suite. So there are meters inside the edit suite. So as you’re mixing, you can see what’s going on. Now, program loudness itself is the average of the whole program. So, it’s not very easy to monitor it. So typically, the loudness meter, as it’s called, would be giving a running program loudness. So as you do the mix, you know what the average is up to that point. You don’t know it until you get to the end. Now you may say, how the hell do you mix to it? Because if it’s running along? And therein is a problem, but actually most well-trained audio mixers have an inherent sense of balance. And the reason why they came up with -23 in Europe and -24 in you in the US is because that’s what you naturally mixed with, you’re trained for it. Now, you may not hit the number exactly, you’ll be slightly off, but you’ll get pretty close to that.

MC:

So when you finished your production, you will have used these five meters to create the sound that you want and then you want to deliver it. Now, when we go to delivery, there’s only three parameters that really matter. And I will change my story in a little while. So the production side, as I said, you use all five in the delivery generally speaking, if you’re doing a broadcast delivery, program loudness and true peak are the bits that matter. The LRA would have been taken care of if you’re doing an episodic or a full broadcast, because that will be within the guideline given to the production company. So people tend not to… The program loudness and true peak are the ones that are most measured when you’re making delivery for broadcast.

MC:

Now, the thing that matters for broadcast then is, if you’re making content and you want to monetize it all over the world, you have to deliver to all over the world. And sadly, most broadcasts have a slightly different audio spec to the recommended. Now, the recommended is a guideline, the EBU is a guideline, in the US, the ATSCA defines it, is a fairly tight spec, but if you go around the world, they may say, “We want the true peak to be -3 or -1 or -2. We want the program loudness to be -23 in Europe, -24 in America,” but they have different tolerances. So in France, it’s got to be bang on -23, you’re not allowed any deviation. So that means on you as a content delivery house, you have to measure these things as they come in to you and as you’re repurposing them, you have to ensure you meet this spec. If you have a theatrical mix, coming from a Hollywood studio for example, like your Mission Impossible, that is an LRA of 30 or there about. And most broadcasters will give you a guideline that the LRA mustn’t be greater than 16 or 18. So you need to reduce it for that.

MC:

And then for social media, there are guidelines, rather than standards, but the big guideline is it’s got to be loud enough. So typically people are talking about -18, -16, as the program loudness. Now, ironically, a content creator may do this, but commercials may be mixed for -23. It may be the one instance where the commercial doesn’t sound as loud as the program, if that spec is met.

MC:

So it’s a lot of fun and games in terms of what you have to do for delivery. The theatrical to broadcast makes it a very, very challenging process because where you have lots of audio dynamics, it’s very hard to predict whether the sounds going to go from quiet to loud to quiet to loud, or consistently loud. So the processing needs to be very, very careful, carefully done. Well, in fact, the loudness processing in general needs to be carefully done because we want to preserve what the audio dubbing mixer wanted to transmit and show to people.

Cindy:

Okay. So in the production process, what it sounds like then, and the delivery process, I guess, really the challenge you’re talking about is you don’t have any idea of what parameters were used when the production took place, right? And then the mixing process might have been designed for a different deliverable because you could be delivering to a German broadcaster, a US broadcaster, Netflix, and you don’t know how that all fits into it. And so that’s definitely the problem. Do you have more to talk about around online? Are you just going to jump right into the solution around that?

MC:

Just a couple of things for the challenges. So we could, as I said, in the production, you use the meters to design the sound and by and large, you’ll be close to the spec for one broadcaster, your primary broadcaster, somebody who employs you for example, but it needs a variation. The other one is you may have content where loudness wasn’t a factor at all, an archive, it was content done 15, 20 years ago, before the loudness pack came out. That’s an issue. And the other one that’s a big issue also is the theatrical content. The theatrical content is built for the cinema because that’s where you make the billion dollars. The broadcast is a long tail.

MC:

So we have spoken to a number of studios and they say, “We only do one mix. We don’t always provide what they call a near field mix.” Or if they provide it, you may not have it. And then the other things that you clearly have, which are not subject of this, but I’ll just mention, is you may have a stereo only mix, but you need to deliver 5.1 and you may have a 5.1, and you need to deliver stereo. Now why this is important is, if you do an upmix or a downmix, you will change the loudness. So the loudness has to be… You have to ensure that the loudness meets the spec if a downmix or an upmix process has occurred.

Cindy:

Got it, got it. Okay. So it means that people… What I’m really hearing is that people who are already using our solutions right now in broadcast and for other types of delivery are now starting to talk to you about online delivery and that’s theatrical mix as well. So a lot of choices there.

MC:

Yeah. So a couple of things I would say is, whilst I’ve described the delivery challenge, if you like, what we do is we have designed a set of algorithms that allow us to meet any deliverable spec and there are plenty of them. So the loudness specs for broadcast is relatively straightforward, true peak and program loudness at slightly different variations. Those we handle by the program loudness is a very simple thing, it’s the average audio level in a program. So if the audio is slightly low, you apply gain. If it’s slightly high, you apply attenuation. Now, if you’re applying gain, you may screw up the true peaks. So we tend to measure all the peaks in the file, put a gate around it, and then we will locally attenuate the peaks and do a little mix in, mix out exactly how you do it in the manual process.

MC:

So the big question is, so why not do it manually? And the reason is for one piece of content, you may need to make 30, 40 deliverables if you’re a studio delivering to multiple clients. And so that becomes almost impossible to do manually in a cost effective manner. So by creating the algorithms that we have, we then have created an automation layer on top of it and that automation layer allows you to do this thing unsupervised and we will deliver to any spec and it’s guaranteed.

MC:

And so the tool, we have two tools, there’s a desktop tool for low volume stuff, where you basically say, every deliverable I have, I create a profile. So I say that I’m delivering to a German broadcaster so it’s -23 program loudness, the true peak is -3, the LRA has to be 16. And we don’t worry about the short term and the momentary for that, that spec defines that deliverable and we will measure the audio to say, “Does it meet that spec?” If it doesn’t, we’ll make the necessary adjustment. Now, if you do it in the desktop, it literally is pick a file, pick a profile, press correct. And it does it. Generates a nice report to tell you what it’s done so that you’re accountable, “It was okay leaving me.” And then if you need to make changes to it, you can edit and rename that spec. Now you can have as many of these profiles as you like. Now, what this means is that the operator doesn’t have to be skilled in audio to do this deliverable.

MC:

The other form of course is, if you’re doing more than a few files a day, you don’t want to employ lots of people to do this, you want to automate the process. So now, you could have our product engine, which has a number of automation strategies though. You could have watch folders, very simple. If you have 16 clients or 16 deliverables, you have 16 watch folders, throw the files in the relevant watch folder and out it pops corrected. If you have a Telestream Vantage or an Aspera Orchestrator, you can have a plugin to that. So whilst you’re preparing your video deliverable in your Vantage, you could have the audio taken care of by engine, and it will do the loudness correction for that.

MC:

Obviously that gives you more than 16 profiles if you need it, because it’s as many as you like. And you could also have this driven by a MAM system. So the MAM system can do this. We publish a rest API, so you can have an API that your in-house automation system can drive. So there are many possibilities. So what we’re trying to do is say that we can do the deliverable for any standard and we can also do a deliverable in an automated fashion through any automation system that you have. But I haven’t spoken about online.

Cindy:

That’s okay. Before you speak about online, I just want to see if I got your key points there. I feel like what you’re saying is with all the different processes that need to be done, they can all be done in an automated way and that means that people can go off and be creative and do what they do best. And then automation makes it repeatable. And with the watch folders, that really makes it super easy and straightforward. And of course, as you mentioned, MAMs and Aspera and Telestream, if you want that integration and the rest API as well. So does that sound like what you were talking about around the automation part?

MC:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. So, easy to use, flexible, scalable. That’s the idea. Now, the online, as I said, it is basically… Let me talk a little bit about online. So as I said, you’re in an environment, if you’re on a plane and you’ve downloaded a movie on your iPad and you want to watch it, the ambient environment is noisy, it could be on a plane, on a train. Why you’d want to watch Mission Impossible in that environment, I don’t know, but hey, people do. I watch it on planes and I’m quite often annoyed about the audio. So people are now coming to us and saying, “Hey, we’ve got a… We do the broadcast because we have to meet a specification. We may get fined. We may get our content rejected. Now we’ve got these online platforms and we need to do that because we want our audio to be heard.”

MC:

And so we have two approaches to this, one, we say, “Tell us the spec and we can deliver it.” The other one is where they say, “Hey, we are not sure what we really want.” And so we do this very frequently, we’ll just interact with the supplier, give them some files, give them some ideas. And a classic one here is not just increasing the volume, it’s really increasing the volume and managing the compression or the dynamics, the LRA. And so the LRA, which was originally we used for taking a theatrical mix and making it broadcast ready. We can now use that to take it even further down. And now what we’re doing is we’re restricting the dynamic range and we’re making it louder, so that if the environment isn’t friendly because it’s noisy, you can still hear the dialogue. And so that’s really where we are with online.

MC:

Now, nothing changes as far as the product itself concerned, you don’t need to do anything different, you just change the settings. And probably the one I have to mention is Netflix have their own ideas about how they want their audio to be presented. So they’ve taken a variation of loudness, which actually is an older version, the loudness spec is evolving. And it is something that threw a lot of people, because it was a technical change.

MC:

Now, when we had the peak program meter in the UK, we had BBC PPM6. So you just didn’t exceed PPM6 and you were in good shape. Here we have four or five parameters and I haven’t mentioned some of the other subtleties in it. And so when Netflix came up with its chain, it was something that non-audio people found challenging. But now remember, at delivery, you don’t have a lot of audio people. You have machine operators, I guess and so on. So those people are sitting there saying, “How do we do this?” So what I was saying to you is we have a service as part of what we do is come and talk to us about your audio needs and we’ll either set it up for you or help you set it up or interact with you to say, “This didn’t work out so well.” So we’ll say, “Okay, let’s try this variation and that variation.”

Cindy:

And does that work for any size company? Do I need to be a big company to do that? Or do you work with smaller companies as well?

MC:

No. We are a small company. We deal a lot with the larger companies and we deal a lot with the smaller companies. So the desktop tool will do everything that the main engine does, it just doesn’t scale. So if you need, we’ve had customers… We had a customer who basically was their first entry into movie mixing. They were big noise in commercials mixing and they said, “We want to mix movies.” So they know their audio, they know things, but they have a deliverable problem. They said, “We have a 7.1 mix, we want to deliver 5.1 in 25 frames. Then for US delivery,” this was a UK company, “we want to time compress the audio and pitch shift it so that it sounds right. And we want 5.1, we want stereo.” And so the guy said, “So, what would you do?” He said, “Well, we’d sit in the Protools suite and knock these out one at a time.” So I said, “Well, what we can do is create a workflow, which will allow you to do this in a single pass.”

MC:

So for them, what they’re really saying is, what will take me a day to do, I can do in an hour. So they look at a saving in a very different manner to somebody who says, “I need 10,000 hours a month for processing.”

Cindy:

Nice. Nice.

MC:

And it’s really that scalability. The algorithm came first, then came the nuts and bolts to sit there and say, “How do we make scalable?” And then came the flexibility of what else can you do with the audio? Because I want to do more than loudness.

Cindy:

Got it, got it. We are going to go to questions in minute because we do have a couple questions, but before we do that, I just wanted to recap. We looked at loudness and the history of loudness, and then really what’s changed and how we’ve moved into those parameters that you talked about. And then talked about delivery challenges and online challenges, which you just hit on. And then of course, as you’re saying, the solution and the automation around it, really no matter what size your facility is. So yeah, that’s where we’re at. So we’d like to take your questions. What questions do you guys have? And the first one, oh yeah, so I’ve had a couple people ask about examples. And so MC, if you could give some examples, that would be great. What customers are doing this now?

MC:

So I already mentioned a little bit about that little films audio house that was going from commercials mixing to film mixing. A lot of post companies do it when they deliver commercials. So we have Smoke and Mirrors in the UK, the Mail. Smoke and Mirrors have offices all over the world as do the Mail. So they use them. We have a little post house in the US, Leo Ticheli in Midwest… I’ve forgotten now.

Cindy:

I think they’re in the Midwest, I’m just trying to remember where Leo Ticheli is as well. Yeah.

MC:

Yeah. Yeah. And they have a couple of edit suites that they use it for. And then on the other scale, we have Viacom in the UK and in the US were very large installations, because all their content needs to be loudness processed. And in the case of Viacom, they are archiving all their content in 24P, but some of their localizations are done at 25. So they’re bouncing between 24 and 25, a multiple number of times, and still doing that.

MC:

We have a number of companies, play out centers in Australia. They’re a very large one Channel Nine and Channel Seven play out operations. They have two engines and they’re doing all their loudness with us, but they’re also doing all their other audio processing, Adobe encoding, upmixing, downmixing, track mapping. As I said, once we get the audio onto the video file, there’s many things we can do with it. And more and more people are coming to us. Comedy Central actually were the ones who came to us with the online, they said they wanted it, primary playout was Alexa for them.

Cindy:

Yeah. I love Comedy Channel. I’m all in.

MC:

Yeah. So that was an example of interactive stuff, because the guideline wasn’t clear from the platform, they came to us and said, “Hey, what would work?” And we interacted with them. And the way the interaction typically works is we have a chat about it, we make some suggestions, they try it out on their own content. If there are issues with it, then they come back to us and they may send us the file over, we’ll do some analysis, we’ll readjust the settings and give them back.

MC:

Now, the reason for this is it is actually a very exact science, but as with audio, it’s extremely subjective. So people have ideas about how they want to present their audio and what’s important and what isn’t important. So, we also have in India, ZTV and all those listening, and I worked together for a couple of years for Z to be able to deliver globally to the world. And we had some very interesting interactions on how we wanted to do this. So, yeah, it really is something that we find pretty much every broadcaster has a need for and use for. And the more with the present look down and things, there’s a huge demand for file based content because live based content is nonexistent or very low in volume. So the people are digging out archives for presentation. So it’s a big, big requirement.

Cindy:

That’s true. You were telling me the other day about the new resurgence around archives. And I liked some of those examples you gave from Comedy Central to Leo Ticheli to Z. You’ve got a nice range, which ties into the next question, which somebody posted and you kind of touched on this. The examples you gave seem like big companies, but I have a small facility. How can this help me in a small facility?

MC:

So yeah, as a small facility, as I said, Leo Ticheli do commercials, so they don’t do many and they got a rejection from one of the people that they were delivering to. The rejection was by way of a report from us, because these guys had our measurement tool. So they talk to us and they bought a couple of desktop products called F. Now we have customers who say, “Well, all I want to do is make sure I comply and not worry about whether I’m going to make adjustments or not.” And so we have a product that starts at $1,000. And it does the measurement and it gives you a report telling you what’s wrong or not wrong, if it’s good. And you can start at that point. So we have a solution really for the very small customers as well.

Cindy:

Nice. And whoever you are, whatever size facility you have, we have a trial for you that you can download it and try it yourself and see what it does for you. So, there’s the link in-

MC:

Yes. If you go on our website and click the try button, which is on every page of our website really, it will take you to a place where you’ll give us your details and we’ll give you a 10 day evaluation license. And you will get some helpful emails about loudness. And at that point, this is our standard way of working, call us, email us with questions. We are happy to help people get going with this.

Cindy:

Nice. Well MC, it’s been a wonderful discussion on this topic and I think we are wrapping up here. Any closing words?

MC:

Well, no. All I can say is, thank you to everyone who attended. We will do some more of these. And actually, if you want to do a download, if you want the fact book, please visit our website. If you have specific questions that you want us to answer, you can email me, , or support and you’ll get our experts helping you with questions on loudness.

Cindy:

Perfect. All right. Well, thank you everybody and have a beautiful day. Thank you MC. See you later.