WRAL Turns to Nexidia Dialogue Search to Tap into Its Extensive Video Archive
Broadcaster WRAL is using Nexidia's Dialogue Search to search its recently digitized archive of more than 26,000 video tapes going all the way back to 1976. Nexidia's Dialogue Search allows WRAL to search its entire archive and locate any spoken word or phrase in seconds despite having little useful metadata to aid the search.
"We digitized our whole archive not only to ensure that those assets would be preserved, but also to complete our transition to an entirely tapeless workflow. The problem is, many of those assets lack sufficient metadata to enable an effective search, and without it, individual clips or even entire assets would be so hard to find that they might as well be lost forever," said Peter Sockett, director of engineering and operations at WRAL and its sister stations WRAZ and WILM, in a statement "Nexidia Dialogue Search gives us back our archive. It's as simple as that. Now we'll actually be able to repurpose those assets easily."
Dialogue Search harnesses Nexidia's patented phonetic search technology to enable search that is independent of logging, transcription, and/or captions. When metadata does exist, Dialogue Search can search and filter results using that metadata i with the dialogue to refine and improve the search. WRAL collects search results into project bins that can be exported directly back to the media or production asset management system or to myriad NLE options, which lets WRAL use different editing solutions in its workflow.
Dialogue Search scans all of the audio in a media library almost instantaneously—as much as 50 times real time per CPU core— and creates an index of the elementary sounds of speech, called phonemes. This approach requires no training and does not rely on dictionaries that could become outdated, and users don't need spell their queries correctly. It works across a wide variety of speakers with varied accents, and the probabilistic nature of the search algorithm means results can be found even in the presence of background noise.
Sony Professional Services introduced WRAL to Nexidia through an alliance between Nexidia and Sony. WRAL will be using Dialogue Search in conjunction with its Sony Optical Disc Archive installation.
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