Marquis Medway Certifies Grass Valley’s LiveTouch, FileFlow

Grass Valley, a Belden Brand, today announced that its LiveTouch sports replay and highlights solution and FileFlow file exchange system are now certified with Marquis Broadcast’s Medway media and metadata automation solution. The certification enables seamless third-party integration with production systems and applications to deliver even faster workflows in mission critical live sports production environments.

As consumer demand for more and higher quality content increases, broadcasters want to capture, produce and deliver this to audiences anytime and anywhere. For sports, this means more live replays from more angles, as well as new services such as live streaming and VR. Adding to the already high-pressure live sports production environment, operators now have to handle a higher number of feeds, which could lead to delays if the right tools and technologies aren’t in place.

Medway says it optimizes integration between LiveTouch and third-party production and editing tools —including Avid Media Composer, NEXIS and Interplay PAM — allowing production teams to maintain existing workflows, while leveraging Grass Valley’s powerful, ultrafast replay and highlights capability.

As the number one player in content and media technology, Grass Valley’s live production solutions, including LiveTouch, have been key components for coverage of some of the world’s major sporting events this year. This certification with Medway opens up the possibility of incorporating Grass Valley’s powerful live replay and highlights capability into any existing production workflow.

“Our customers want the option to leverage the powerful, ultra-fast performance that LiveTouch delivers, while maintaining their existing production workflows and integrations,” said Matthew Zajicek director of replay, Grass Valley. “By expanding the LiveTouch ecostructure, we enable them to do this without compromising on the speed that content is turned around.

“We looked around the market at the available technologies to meet this important need, and Medway proved to be an incredibly good fit. Our work with Marquis ensures there is no additional complexity for customers looking to integrate LiveTouch into their existing workflows; Medway does everything for them.”

Cross-platform editing can now be done while incoming live feeds are being ingested, allowing replay and highlights packages from LiveTouch to be delivered even faster. Medway’s bi-directional sequence level integration means files are “discreet,” enabling edit decision lists (EDLs) to be changed up or downstream of the third-party integration with seamless export of files between platforms. Medway automatically transcodes and re-wraps files with no delays for smooth file transfers between third-party platforms.

Metadata is also critical to delivering the best angles of key moments quickly. Working in combination, FileFlow and Medway streamline metadata management, delivering seamless real time metadata integration to meet even the most demanding live production requirements.

Chris Steele, Marquis Broadcast managing director, said: “We are really pleased to see how easily the platforms integrated and the resulting performance they deliver. This integration was made easier by the fact that Marquis and Grass Valley understand each other’s files and the level of similarity and standardization between our approaches. It opens up a large off-the-shelf library of integration choices for LiveTouch and Medway customers across a host of sports and live applications.”

The certified integration is now available on general release. An upgrade enables existing LiveTouch, FileFlow and Medway customers to retro-fit the new capability into their current systems. HDR support will be added in the coming months.