Media Management for Industrial Research

Our WebTV platform has the ability to synchronise other media with video. We elaborated on this idea with MARIN, the largest independent maritime research institute in the world. Together with them we developed .

InSync is a media asset management system that synchronises measurement data from industrial research with other media captured during the tests.

Media asset management for industrial research poses a variety of challenges:

• Large datasets require workflow automation to handle activities more efficiently
• There are lots of different types of measurement data (e.g. pressure, light, sound, geographical and biological sensors)
• Measurement data from sensors with high sample rates
• There are different types of video recordings with different framerates
• Both measurement data and other media resources require large and fast storage facilities
• Processing data and media to connected devices is labour intensive
• The visualizations needs to synchronize all data and video at the highest possible precision.
• Researchers need to be able to zoom in to measurement data
• Video and high-speed recordings need to dynamically change their playout rate
• For sharing it is important to allow annotation/tagging to pinpoint specific moments

At MARIN we have developed a complete process/pipeline for integrating media and measurement assets into InSync. InSync makes these assets searchable through the “Web-based Search and Retrieval System“. InSync can also aggregate these assets into the Stageplayer. This is an advanced media player that allows researchers to navigate through the measurement and media data in synchronised manner. The following video demonstrates this tool:

Another challenge is the fact that within industrial research the research questions are never the same, and hence the type of measurements and media workflow within the research also differ. In order to develop a solution that caters for different situations, we incorporated flexibility into the system and use open formats for the exchange of data between different modulair components: 

• Asset Collector Tool, collects and generates metadata for all assets
• Asset Ingestion Service using watchfolders, to quickly integrate your media/measurement data into InSync.
• Web-based File Explorer, for exploring the InSync folder structure.
• Web-based Search and Retrieval system, provides advanced filters to find/download/export assets.
• Stageplayer, for synchronised playback of video and data in a web-based environment or stand-alone app.
• We use Docker to deploy InSync.

Secure offline exchange of data
A very important aspect in the choice of frameworks that are used is the requirement that they are able to run both in online and offline environments, such as a usb-disk or an external hard-disk. This off- and online feature is an important characteristic for industrial research where often a high degree of security is required. The local network of the research facility is often disconnected from the Internet and clients of the research institute do not allow online distribution of the research results. With InSync technology this is not an issue because the measurement data including media search and synchronised playout can also be distributed to the client using an offline carrier.

Download a PDF brochure about our data synchronisation or contact us to learn more.