The EBU group on Quality Control (QC) will soon become an 'EBU Strategic Programme', emphasising the urgent need for broadcasters to sort out how they can best check the quality of the material they commision, produce, archive an distribute.
Ingest, archive and delivery/exchange
The EBU's QC activity has been active since spring 2011, under the chairmanship of Andy Quested (BBC) and Reinhard Knör (IRT). The work is distributed over three focus areas:
1. QC in ingest - where format compatibiliy is an important issue.
2. QC in legacy archive transfer - where maintaining the available quality over time is key
3. QC in delivery & exchange - where "baseband" audio and video checks receive most focus
For each of above clusters, the QC group participants are gathering user requirements, typically based on their direct, practical experience. One such a participant is Roman Meszmer (ORF), who also leads the Group's legacy archive activity. In his work at Austrian public broadcaster ORF, Roman has encountered many of the challenges surrounding archive transfer, including: the large quantity of files to process (> 1 million), the combined data size (~ 10 Petabytes), the plethora of videoformats used, MXF implementation errors, the use (or not) of checksums, differences between the needs of various in-house departments, etc., etc. He has gathered some of his experiences in the new EBU Technical Review article "QC - and longterm archiving experience" .
Example of a QC workflow for exchange/delivery
The aim of the EBU's QC work is to help implement QC in a 'wise way', by minimising duplication and focussing on the most important QC checks at each stage of production. A quick tour of products at the IBC showed a large number of QC tools is available already and that vendors are open to develop those for and integrate them into broadcasters' new workflows. It is now first of all up to the broadcasters to identify the optimum approaches and product wishes. For more information on the EBU's QC work, see the QC page on this website or contact: Frans de Jong (EBU)