This section details upcoming events, recent events, project announcements and publicly available information releases from the Avatar-M project.
After continued research and development, the Avatar-M project has started another series of trials for end-user scenarios.
The intention of these trials is to test the technologies within the project against the needs of end-users.
Should you have an interest in participating in these trials, please send an e-mail enquiry along with your contact details to enquiries@avatar-m.org.uk
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According to many of the people we’ve spoken too the NAB show this year is less busy than in times past- unsurprisingly. However, it’s really only in terms of numbers. We’ve been non-stop on the AVATAR-m stand, talking to people interested in archiving from across the whole spectrum of A/V interest. It seems that everyone, from digital cinema, to broadcast, to scientific data curation is facing the problems we’re trying to solve, and all of them are coming to see us!
When we get the chance, we’re meeting with other exhibitors too- both to understand better where other components of themedia infrastructure ecology are headed, and to see where our research and innovation can make a real difference. Plus, there’s a helicopter in the next hall- cool!
We’d always accommodated to potential to upgrade the software after the big demo rigs were shipped to the US, and this morning we took advantage of the lull caused by the breakdown of the Vegas monorail to rebuild the aStor machines. Picture below shows Richard and Mark hard at work rebuilding the storage stacks as Stuart diverts attention.
It’s lunchtime on day one of our NAB adventure, and worth taking a moment to reflect on how it’s going. We’ve had a few very interested visitors to our stand, mostly from people who are facing the archiving challenges that led to us starting this project. That’s really encouraging, and we’ve been really gratified to see how our technologies are recognised as being so potentially useful. In fact as the morning has gone on we’ve had more and more visitor, and most have stayed for quite a while- a good sign we think!
However, the mission here has also been about how we can find potential future exploitation partners, so we need to start making those connections. Exibitors and visitors who are looking at the next generation of their products and how they can meet this growing need are being hunted down as I type this, by gret shirt wearing ‘Avartites’.
Of course, we’re still halfway through an R&D project too. Thanks to Jim and Bryan on the Frontporch/Samma stand too for the pointer to the AXF work of SMPTE, we’ll be following up that lead this week. We’ll also be investigating how we can optimise integration with productiuon environments large and small (including the much rumoured, but as yet un-announced, new version of Final Cut Pro).
We’re really looking forward to meeting people at NAB this week, which opens in just under four hours. We’ll be in the South Upper hall, on stand SU 7235, and we’ll also be tweeting as ‘avatarm’. See you at the show- and remember, you can follow NAB tweets with the following three hashtags: #NAB, #NAB09, and #NABSHOW. (No, we don’t know why there are three tags either).
Right, if all has gone to plan the entire team will now be in Vegas. Ant and Rajitha from the BBC, Greg, Andy and Lee from ODS have just flown in, and Tim, Stuart, Mark and Anne from Xyratex, and Richard from ITInnovations have been setting up on SU7235 for the last few days. So, if you’re in the hall and finishing your set up too, good luck, and if you’re comming along to the show tomorrow we hope to see you soon.
By popular request we’ve now uploaded a version of our film in HD on the Public Documents page. As many people have pointed out, the animation is really only done justice at higher def- thankfully we’re taking Bluray to show on the Stand- come see at SU7235.
We’re delighted to be able to show our new promotional film for the project here for the first time. Available to view on the Public Documents page, and hosted on Vimeo, our film introduces the business and technical challenges we’re seeking to address with the project, and technical experts from across the consortium outline the innovations they are bringing to the effort. We’d like to thank the guys at Milo Creative for their efforts on the film and designing the web site for us too.
Avatar-M Promo film, NAB 2009 from Ant Miller on Vimeo.
We’ll have DVDs of the film available on stand SU7325, and the full HD version showing too (we hope!).
We’ve just updated out White Papers section with two additional papers from the last 12 months:
Sustainable Archiving and Storage Management of Audiovisual Digital Assets is from IBC last year and focuses on specifying and governing federated storage services for archive.
A Service Oriented Approach to Online Digital Audiovisual Archives was presented at the NEM summit in St. Malo last year and focusses on how to use SOA for meeting the business needs of archives.
Welcome to the brand new Avatar-M website, launched to coincide with our appearance at the NAB Show in Las Vegas, USA. In this website we hope to give you a good overview of the business needs we are addressing, and the technologies we’ve developed to meet the challenges. There are White Papers and other guides to download, and we’ll soon have a copy of our promotional video available too.
At NAB the project will be displaying our first generation demonstration systems on stand SU7325. In this first iteration of the demonstrator you’ll be able to see how our systems can ingest and manage large volume data storage over disparate platforms, and we hope to demonstrate integration with broadcast standard editing equipment and workflows.
If you’re interested in exploring the future of large scale A/V archival we’d be delighted to discuss how we can cooperate in the future.