Quasar – Native Cloud File QC

QC made easy for Cloud workflows

  • Dynamic Scaling
  • Multi Cloud Support – AWS & Azure
  • Pay-Per-Use Service
  • SaaS or Private edition option

Quasar – SaaS

  • Software hosted by Venera
  • Use QC with simple REST API
  • Seamless service for AWS & Azure
  • Monthly, Annual or longer-term plans

Quasar – Private

QC within your own VPC

  • Advanced features such as Dynamic Scaling
  • Use QC with simple REST API
  • Available for AWS & Azure
  • Monthly, Annual or longer-term plans
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Overview

With file-based workflows increasingly moving to the cloud, it is only natural to have your file-based QC process within the cloud as well, taking advantage of the scalability and efficient resource planning inherent in the native cloud applications.

Quasar™ is the first native Cloud file QC service and helps you perform file-based QC on your cloud assets with ease. Encompassing all the latest features of Pulsar; industry’s most efficient automated content verification solution used by many large media corporations worldwide and built natively for the cloud architecture, Quasar™ promises the fastest rate of QC in the cloud.

Features & Benefits

Dynamic scaling

Quasar™ is an elastic system that can be auto scaled to any size without needing users’ intervention allowing hundreds of files being processed simultaneously. Performing QC on large content library or a content burst can be very time-consuming. With Quasar™, you never have to worry about varying content volumes. Just post them to Quasar™ for processing and it will be processed quickly. The QC jobs that would take months to process can be processed in just a few days.

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Security & Latency

One of biggest worry for content processing on Cloud is the content security. Along with it, the content latency is also an important consideration. Following capabilities are available in Quasar to address these:

  • IAM roles support
  • Pre-authenticated URL
  • Temporary security credentials
  • No storage of user’s credentials anywhere in the Quasar system
  • No access to user’s content and the processing VMs to even our support teams
  • Auto provisioning of virtual machine in the content region. This has the following benefits
    1. No inter-region latency allowing faster content processing
    2. No egress charges
    3. Compliance with local laws that may prohibit the content movement outside the country/region
Service reliability

Quasar is a highly reliable service that has implemented a large number of service recommendations in terms of service reliability and security.

  • Advanced monitoring for early detection of any potential problems in the service performance
  • Detailed system logging allowing us to trace back any rare issues
  • Failover mechanisms allowing the workflow continuity in case of infrastructure failures
SaaS

Quasar service is available as fully managed SaaS service as well as a Private edition that users can deploy in their own virtual private cloud (VPC).
Following are the key benefits of using SaaS service:

  • Users don’t need to engage any of their staff for system mgmt. This alone can save significant time & cost for users, while focusing on their core business.
  • Users can immediately start using the Quasar system – either manually or via REST API.
  • Committed SLAs for service upkeep.
VOD QC

In addition to support for broadcast formats, Quasar supports VOD formats such as adaptive bitrate formats and fragmented MP4. Key capabilities include:

  • Formats. MPEG-DASH, Apple HLS and Microsoft Smooth Streaming
  • Encrypted packages support
  • Auto-assignment of different QC templates to different encoding profiles
  • Adaptive bitrate package specific checks to help validate the integrity of ABR packages
Harding PSE

We have integrated Harding FPA engine within Quasar. This allows users to perform Photosensitive Epilepsy validation using the industry defacto standard Harding PSE. Users will also receive a valid Harding certificate for every file processed via Quasar.

Wide range of checks

Quasar – file based QC on Cloud supports a wide range of checks. Small selection of checks are displayed here. Click here for the detailed list.
Color Gamut

Color Gamut

Flash Frames

Flash Frames

Audio Loudness (Audio Waveform)

Audio Loudness

EAS

EAS

Active Region

Active Region

Photosensitive Epilepsy

Photosensitive Epilepsy

Audio Peaks

Audio Peaks

Audio Test Tone

Audio Test Tone

Cadence

Cadence

Language ID

Language ID

Audio Clipping

Audio Clipping

Audio Drops

Audio Drops

Color Gamut

Color Gamut

Active Region

Active Region

Cadence

Cadence

Flash Frames

Flash Frames

Photosensitive Epilepsy

Photosensitive Epilepsy

Language ID

Language ID

Audio Loudness (Audio Waveform)

Audio Loudness

Audio Peaks

Audio Peaks

Audio Clipping

Audio Clipping

EAS

EAS

Audio Test Tone

Audio Test Tone

Audio Drops

Audio Drops

Technical specs

Formats

Container: MXF, GXF, LXF, MOV, MP4, 3GPP, MPEG-2 TS, MPEG-2 PS, FLV, WMV, AVI, WAV, BWF, AIFF, Smooth Streaming, HLS, MPEG-DASH, IMF, DCP, Elementary

Video: H.265, H.264 (incl. AVC-Intra 50/100 and SONY XAVC), MPEG-2 (incl. D10, XDCAM, HDCAM, IMX-30/50), VC-1, DV (incl. DVCPro25, DVCPro50, DVCPro100/HD), Avid DNxHD (VC-3), Apple ProRes, JPEG-2000, Canopus HQ/HQX

Audio: LPCM, AES3, SMPTE 302M, MPEG-1/2, AAC, HE-AAC, WMA (Standard & Professional)

HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR-10, HDR-10+

Verification Checks

General: Compliance, Factory templates – Netflix, DPP, ARD-ZDF, Loudness (R128, CALM, OP-59, ARIB), iTunes & CableLabs

IMF/DCP: CPL based analysis, Package validation, CPL cross-checks, CPL checks, PKL cross-checks, OPL checks, Assetmap check, IMSC checks, Sidecar checks DNxHD (VC-3), Apple ProRes, JPEG-2000, Canopus HQ/HQX

ABR: Playlist cross checks. Segment cross checks, Profile cross checks, Encrypted Packages

Video Parameters: Codec, Video Format, Color space, Chroma Format, Color Matrix, Scan Mode, Duration, Frame Rate, Resolution, Display/Pixel Aspect Ratio, GOP Length, GOP Type, Field Order, Frame Sizes, Buffer Size, Bitrate (CBR/VBR), Profile/Level, Entropy Coding, Reference Pictures, MBAFF, Timecode Discontinuity, Timecode frame drop, 2020 Color Space

Video Quality: Black Frames, Blockiness, Brightness, Cadence, Chroma Hits, Chroma Line, Clipping, Colored Frames, Color Bars, Color Gamut, Combing, Credit Roll, Camera Dead Pixels, Dead Pixels, Digital Hits, Field Dominance, Flash Frames, Freeze Frames, Luma/Chroma levels, Cadence, Half/Full lines, Bar Artefacts, Letter/Pillar Box, Active Region, Photosensitive epilepsy (Harding)

HDR Parameters: HDR Formats, Reporting of HDR10, HDR10+, and Dolby Vision metadata

Static Metadata: Verify (display Color primaries, mastering display luminance, content light level)

Dynamic Metadata: Compliance, Validate HDR10+ metadata (MaxSCL, Average Max RGB, Distribution values, Tone-mapping information, Targeted system display maximum luminance), Validate Dolby Vision metadata (Metadata version, shot must not contain <0,0,0> in level 1 metadata, Detect duplicate dynamic metadata, Crosscheck canvas aspect ratio, Crosscheck Video track information, Crosscheck (Calculated/metadata) Image aspect ratio

Audio: Codec, Sampling Frequency, Quantization Bits, Channels, Bitrate (CBR/VBR), Drops, Silence, Mute, Test Tones, Loudness (R128, CALM, AGCOM, ARIB, Speech Gated), Loudness Range, Dialnorm, Sample Peak (DBFS, PPM), True Peak, Dual Mono, Clipping, EAS tone, Phase Mismatch, Nielsen Watermarks, Language ID

Container: Conformance, Format, File Size, File Name Validation, No of streams, Incorrect extension MXF: Version, Operational pattern, Timecode presence/track count/mode/start value/source, Index table presence/location/completeness/correctness, Origin parameters, KLV alignment grid/fill elements, Partitions validity/Status/Completeness/Instance count/Index table presence/Essence presence/Max length, Essence wrapping/external check/referencing/partition strategy, Audio track numbers/element size/channel count/configurations, Descriptive metadata presence/scheme, Run-in sequence, Random index pack, Segmentation track, File package count, Index edit rate, Index duration, Audio/Video sample rate, Audio/Video stream type, Audio/Video edit rate, Video line map, System item presence, Block Align, Channel status mode, Fixed channel status data, Stored F2 offset, Display F2 offset, Sampled X/Y offset, Display X/Y offset, Identical GOP indicator, Edit unit byte count, Slice count, Dark metadata, Timecode frame drop, Audio locked/unlocked status, Audio ref level, Index start position, Single index location, Single essence location, Forward index direction, Image start/end offset, Colour siting, Padding bits, Black ref level, White ref level, Colour range, Constant B picture flag, Single sequence, Low delay, AS-02 Support Transport Streams: SCTE35, Program count, PCR Jitter, Packet Length, PID Usage, PIDs, PID Bitrate, Packet Intervals, PAT checks, PMT checks, Stream checks, PES checks, Language Metadata Verification

QuickTime: Checks and correction for PASP, FIEL, GAMA, CLAP, COLR. Channel Configuration, Track properties, Movie properties, Language Metadata Verification, Check disabled tracks, Check multiple codec entries, Check Timecode properties

Cross Checks: Video-Container: Width, Height, Frame rate, Aspect ratio, Bitrate, Profile/Level, Scan mode, Field order, Chroma format, GOP type, GOP length, B-pictures, Low delay,
Duration, Component depth Audio-Container: Sampling frequency, Bit depth, Channels, Bitrate, Duration
Audio-Video: Duration in meta-data, Actual duration

Meta-data: Closed Captions (608/708) presence/conformance/format/location, AFD, Bar, V-Chip, Teletext

Cloud platforms
Azure
AWS
Storage formats
  • AWS S3
  • Azure Blob
  • Google Cloud Storage
  • Backblaze Storage

Workflow Integration

Quasar exposes REST APIs for integration. It is straightforward to integrate Quasar with your cloud-based workflows. Following are some of the key integrations.

Customer Testimonials

"Venera and its products are in line with our requirements. By using Quasar Native Cloud QC system in our content workflows, we have been able to automate a large part of manual QC and it has significantly improved the operational efficiency of our workflow."

Balu Ramamurthy
CEO, Desynova Digital

Desynova Digital
CEO

"After seeing a demo of CapMate™ for the first time, we immediately saw value in the platform. By integrating CapMate™’s powerful features into our automated workflow, we’ve been enabled to process files at lightning speed, drastically reducing the manual effort needed to verify our partner’s caption files."

Jack Hurley
Director of Digital Production, Cinedigm

Cinedigm
Digital Production Director
adstream

“After assessing other file-based QC systems, we found that Quasar was the correct solution for Adstream and solved the challenges of finding a single QC solution which included features required to offer the ability to QC commercial content against unique regional needs at the volume required to service a global market”

Michael Lee
Global Operations Director, Adstream

Michael Lee
Global Operations Director, Adstream

Quasar™ Editions

SaaS Private Description
Pricing model Subscription Subscription Monthly, Annual & Longer-term plans
Infrastructure cost Venera User Includes the costs for running various Quasar components such as Quasar Controller, Verification Units, Database etc.
Infrastructure management Venera User Staff required to manage the Quasar QC infrastructure. In case of SaaS, the entire management is done by Venera. For Private edition, user will designate their own staff to manage the Quasar systems and related infra
QC Engine hosting Venera’s cloud infrastructure User’s cloud infrastructure The location where Quasar systems will be hosted
Web portal hosting Venera Venera Hosted and managed by Venera in all cases
Content storage location Owned by user Owned by user The location where user’s content will be stored
Pulsar Professional
  • Perpetual license
  • Ability to process four files at a time
  • Can use up to 32 Cores
  • Fastest Edition of Pulsar
  • Ideal for high volume operations
Pulsar Standard
  • Perpetual license
  • Ability to process one file at a time
  • Can use up to 8 cores
  • Ideal for normal operations
Pulsar PPU
  • Usage-based pricing
  • No permanent license
  • Only solution of its kind in the market
  • Ability to process one file at a time
  • Capable of Harding PSE
  • Ideal for low volume occasional use

Recent Blog Post

Latest Post On Home Page
Media offline is a term used to describe the situation where a portion of a content is inaccessible or cannot be played due to a technical error, a missing media segment, or other reasons.   How does this happen? One of the most important steps during the post-production process for a content is ‘Editing’. A typical editing project comprises many media clips and segments that are stitched together in the timeline, in order to create the complete content. A professional editing solution keeps references to all these segments and allows publishing of the final render once the editing process is completed. These media segments can reside in various storage such as SD-Card, SAN, NAS, USB, HDD, etc. Imagine a scenario where a fresh piece of content is received on an SD card. The editor inserts this SD card into the Editing software and adds the media files on the SD card on to the editing timeline. It looks all good at preview and the editor saves the project. The editor comes the next day, removes the SD card while continuing to work on the editing project. On previewing the file, the editor suddenly sees “Media Offline” image in the video. This “Media offline” image is inserted by the Editing solution when the referenced media is not accessible due to the removal of the SD card. This can also happen if a media file is deleted, moved, renamed or simply becomes inaccessible in a network storage. It can also happen due to slow access to the storage. The actual “Media Offline” image also varies across different editing solutions. Here are some examples:     Unfortunately, human mistakes & network issues continue to happen in the editing environment and therefore, such a scenario is common. However, the presence of “Media Offline” segments in the final content delivered out of the post-production process is completely unacceptable. Its presence will lead to content rejection, thereby damaging the reputation of the post-production house. If the issue is detected in time before delivery, rectification is fairly easy as it is only a matter of providing correct reference to the missing media file inside the editing solution.   How to rectify “Media Offline”? Comprehensive rectification requires timely & accurate detection of “Media offline” issues in the content. There are two ways of detecting media offline: manual and automated.   Manual Method to Detect Media Offline The manual method involves an operator manually checking the content to determine if the “Media Offline” image is present in the content. The image can be present for a few frames or for a longer duration, depending on the length of missing content. This will require an operator to watch through the entire content, which can be a time-consuming process and is prone to human errors.   Automated Method to Detect Media Offline An Automated QC solution can detect “Media offline” in the content without any manual intervention. An operator just needs to configure the template in the video QC software and the rest is done automatically. This test by the video quality checker software is also accurate and therefore, can be relied upon without a need for a manual scan. Using an Automated File QC solution for this detection is faster and more efficient than manual methods, thereby helping optimize the content workflows.   Pros and Cons of Manual and Automatic Methods There are hardly any cons of using Automated methods, as the investment in QC software is easily offset by the cost savings by eliminating manual intervention. Venera offers a wide range of Automated QC solutions – both for on-premise (Pulsar) and Cloud deployment (Quasar). Quasar & Pulsar are perfect solutions for automated media offline detection, allowing you to detect and fix media offline issues quickly and efficiently. This helps minimize the impact of such QC issues on production timelines and budgets while retaining the reputation of the post-production company. By relying on Quasar & Pulsar, post-production houses can be certain that content delivered by them to their customers is free of “Media Offline” issues. Venera’s QC solutions are also highly customizable, allowing users to configure them to their specific needs and requirements. Users can choose to invest upfront in a QC software license or can pay on a usage basis. With these options available, using a QC solution to detect and eliminate Media Offline issues efficiently is easy & feasible for everyone.   We hope this article has been informative and helpful in understanding media offline and its implications on media production. We would love to hear about your experiences and tips for dealing with media offline. Please share your thoughts and recommendations in the comments section below. [...]
The presence of captions and subtitles with digital media files has become more prominent and nearly universal. We often see content creators and distributors contemplate the difference between a Caption Authoring system and a Caption/Subtitle QC system and whether they are both needed. So, we thought it is worthwhile to clarify and differentiate the role each software category provides. Caption/Subtitle Authoring and Caption/Subtitle QC remain two separate and distinct activities. While caption authoring is used to create captions and subtitles, caption QC is an increasingly important part of any caption/subtitle workflow in order to ensure the optimum end-user experience when viewing captions. The caption QC until recently, had remained a time-consuming and resource intensive manual process. The advent of advanced and automated caption QC software, such as CapMate from Venera Technologies, is now providing a logical alternative to the tedious manual caption QC process, allowing automation of a large portion of this process. To further clarify and differentiate between caption authoring tools and caption QC tools, we will examine some scenarios to help you appreciate the importance of specialized caption QC systems.   Caption/Subtitle Creation A common authoring system will let you generate raw captions using ASR (Automated Speech Recognition) technology that provides the first draft of the captions. An operator is required to then add the captions missed by the ASR technology and properly align/format all the captions as needed. Authoring systems may provide basic measurements such as CPS (Characters Per Second), WPM (Words Per Minutes) and CPL (Characters Per Line) that will allow you to rectify the basic ‘timing’ issues. Since the raw captions are generated by the tool itself, they are expected to be aligned with the converted audio. However, the responsibility of aligning any new captions you add lies with you. Authoring tools probably can not provide any analysis capabilities for sync issues on the user added segments. Another common requirement is to ensure that the captions are not placed on top of burnt-in text in the video. Again, you will have to manually ensure that no such overlapping sections exist in the video and an operator will have to watch the entire video content in order to ensure this. The full review of the caption/video is similarly required for many other common issues. So, while an authoring system allows you to create, edit and format your captions efficiently, it usually doesn’t provide rich analysis capabilities to QC the captions. The responsibility of detecting basic issues and correcting them lies with you.   Caption/Subtitle Compliance Let’s take this a step further. In today’s world, ensuring the basic sanity of captions is not enough. Every major broadcaster or OTT service provider or educational content provider has its own technical specifications for the captions it requires. There can be many such requirements, a few of which are as follows: – Max number of lines of caption per screen. – Minimum and Maximum duration of each caption. – Captions sync aligned with audio to a maximum specified sub-second threshold. – All captions to be placed at the bottom third of the screen, while avoiding burnt-in text overlay. In case of overlap, another position may be used. – Detection of profanity (words defined by the user to be unacceptable) – Spelling checks. Caption/Subtitle Editing So far, we have discussed only the Caption creation scenario. However, a lot of times, an existing caption file needs to be repurposed because of editing in the audio-visual content. Such changes can include the addition of certain video segments, removal of segments, changing caption location based on customer guidelines, or frame rate changes. We have encountered many cases where the customers have been trying to use the original captions with such edited content, which leads to a lot of issues. Detecting and correcting such issues manually can be time-consuming and resource intensive. Since authoring tools do not usually provide auto-analysis capabilities, they can’t help with the detection of such issues. The only way you can use caption authoring systems in this case is to use their user interface and detect/correct such issues manually. Any compromise in this manual process will lead to missed issues in the content delivered to the customers/content owner. This will effectively mean multiple iterations, causing further delays and affecting customer satisfaction before the captions are accepted by the customer. This is where the caption QC tools come in. Caption QC systems address these issues head-on by performing auto-detection (and in case of advanced systems like CapMate, auto-correction) for a wide-range of caption issues. With configurable QC templates, you can set up the checks you needed, define the acceptable thresholds, and let the system do its job. Since the aim of such systems is the analysis, the entire interface is designed to make the analysis and spotting quick & efficient. You only need to act upon the issues reported by the caption QC system. An intelligent caption QC system such as CapMate also provides features to automatically correct many of the issues found, as well as a rich review/editing tool, using which you can easily browse through the reported issues and make the appropriate manual corrections efficiently. They no longer need to watch the entire content.   Not using captions QC tools means that the responsibility of detecting and correcting all captions issues lies with you, which is time-consuming and resource intensive, not to mention error-prone. While it is understood that the concept of ‘Automated Captions QC & Correction’ is relatively new but adopting such a system can lead to significant business benefits. Our customers who have adopted the use of CapMate into their workflow are benefiting from the efficiencies gained in their caption QC operations from the insights provided by the tool along with its auto-correction abilities. In conclusion, Caption QC and Caption Authoring tools serve different and complimentary purposes in the caption workflow operation and do their respective jobs in an excellent manner. While Caption QC tools are not intended for caption authoring, Caption Authoring tools are also not well-suited, nor are they intended, for efficient caption QC process. Using both tools judiciously in a workflow can lead to higher quality caption deliveries with more efficient use of the experienced QC operators. About CapMate™ CapMate™ is a Cloud Native SaaS service for Captions/Subtitles QC and Correction. Whether you are a Captioning service provider, OTT service provider, Broadcaster or a Captioning platform, CapMate can significantly improve your workflow efficiency with its automatic analysis, rich review, spotting, and correction capabilities. Once completed, you can export the finished captions for direct use in production. Get in touch with us today and we would love to discuss with you how we can help you solve your content QC challenges efficiently! [...]
Many of our customers had been telling us that the process of validating and correcting closed caption files is tedious, time consuming and costly! And that they needed an innovative QC solution for caption and subtitle files, similar to what we have done for Audio/Video QC. We took that request to heart and have introduced CapMate, the first comprehensive cloud native caption QC software that provides verification and correction of captions and subtitle files. In fact, CapMate is so innovative and bleeding edge that many are not even aware of such a solution category! Of course, there are a large selection of capable programs in the ‘captioning’ category that allow for creation of caption and subtitle files. However, until CapMate came around, there was NO solution to address the dire need for an innovative automated software for caption QC that could find caption related issues, much less fix them! Before CapMate, caption verification and correction was a painfully slow, manual, and error prone process. And so starting with this blog post and following up with a series of short blogs, I would like to introduce you to this new category of software and tell you more about CapMate! Let me start by giving you the highlights! CapMate: Is a cloud-native solution that can work with your local content or those in the AWS cloud Has been in heavy production use for over a year and so it already is a robust and proven solution Helps drastically reduce the amount of time needed to verify and fix caption files, improving operational efficiency Supports all the major caption formats such as SCC, SRT, IMSC, EBU-STL, and many more Has usage-based pricing (monthly/annual/ad-hoc) so you only pay for what you use Can detect the most common and difficult caption issues, like Sync, Text Overlap, missing caption, and many more Can also correct these issues, in most cases automatically, and allow you to generate a new clean caption file And so much more…. You can see a short 1-min clip highlighting CapMate’s features here. Be on a look out for CapMate 102, the next blog in this series where I will write about one of the key features of CapMate, its ability to accurately detect and correct caption sync issues! At any time that you think CapMate may be the subtitle QC software solution you have been looking for, contact us (sales@stage.veneratech.com), and we are happy to give you a live demo of CapMate and set you up with a FREE trial account!     [...]

Video Resources

Interview with Jan Klier

MetalToad interview: Cloud QC

Pulsar file-based QC overview

Pulsar/Quasar at SMPTE 2016

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