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Search Words Spoken in Video Soundtracks - MerlinOne Shows New Technology at DV Expo

Quincy, MA, October 22, 2007 - Did you ever try to find a sound bite in an hour long video, stored on a disk drive full of other videos, with file names like btp10305a-new.mov? And you wish the computer would just find the file and jump right to your specific phrase? Now it can.

At the Digital Video Expo West show in Los Angeles, MerlinOne, Inc., will demonstrate an HD video-capable version of its Merlin 5 Digital Asset Management system that lets users find audio/video content by actually searching for words that are spoken in the audio track.

"How can soundtrack searching be used? Imagine browsing a large video database of news shows," said John Harrison, VP of Sales & Marketing at MerlinOne. "A user can enter a word or phrase (like "hurricane") and get back a list of videos that contain the word spoken somewhere in the audio track. When the user opens a specific video, the playhead is cued up to where the word is spoken. Clearly, this saves a tremendous amount of time otherwise lost to locating, mounting, viewing or jogging video clips."

"Audio/video searching is part of our Merlin Digital Asset Management system. That means, in one go, a user can define a search and find audio/video content along with related photos, graphics, scripts and other documents," said Harrison.

Merlin Video can fit into many different workflows and applications:

  • For HD video production to manage source video, photos, scripts and audio clips.
  • As a central resource to store, find, manage and share finished products and outtakes.
  • To manage distribution to external websites.
  • As a premium public site, to find and replay previously aired content with full-text search.

"The issue with managing video is that metadata (dateline, byline, caption, script) is almost never captured with the video file. This makes searching for a video file very difficult, unless you remember the date it was shot, or the filename... not much to go on in a library of thousands of clips," said Harrison.

"Since metadata is the key to managing video, we made the commitment to find a way to fill in video metadata without requiring human effort. Our technology extracts video/audio soundtracks, converts speech to text, and then indexes the text for full-text searching. It is a big step forward in making video asset management truly useful," said Harrison.

The Digital Video Expo Show runs December 4-6, 2007 at the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, CA. MerlinOne will show Merlin Video Asset Management System at booth 617.

About MerlinOne - MerlinOne, Inc. is a leading provider of digital asset management systems and electronic document discovery platforms. E-Sheets® is the foremost electronic tearsheets service. The Merlin picture desk / digital asset management solution has over 140 major installations including The White House, Pfizer, Harvard Business School, NPR, The Employment Law Group®, Posternak Blankstein & Lund, Studeo Legal, The Humane Society, The New York Times and USA Today. MerlinOne technology helps companies manage photos, text, graphics, PDFs, multimedia and e-discovery material. MerlinOne's largest system contains 22 terabytes of data, supports 30,000 users and delivers searches in a second. MerlinOne is an EDRM participating organization.

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