Press - Video Asset Management

The Spokesman-Review Adds Cutting Edge Merlin Video and Audio

Quincy, MA, August 20, 2008 - Trying to find a quote from a year's worth of hourly talk shows? Not a problem for the staff at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, WA. They also have 3-years's worth of video searchable at their fingertips.

The Spokesman-Review has implemented High-Definition video asset management to its Merlin Digital Asset Management System that lets users actually search for the words spoken in audio tracks. With this powerful technology, Spokesman-Review staff can find digital video and audio files that contain specific words or phrases. Merlin's video and audio search results are automatically cued to the spot where the search term is spoken: this saves tremendous time that would have been lost to locating, mounting, viewing or jogging video and audio clips.

During installation, more than 400 legacy audio files and 230 legacy video files were ingested, indexed and made immediately searchable and accessible for the newsroom and web staffs.

"The installation has gone well. We got most of our legacy material loaded, including radio content. We have a radio broadcast studio in our newsroom that broadcasts news from our web site every hour and we do a 1-hour talk show daily. The text extraction works really well from our radio files," commented Larry Reisnouer, Director of Photography at The Spokesman-Review.

Merlin's powerful video asset management system provides not only advanced searching, but gives editors the ability to monitor the status of the video through production stages as well as tag in and out points that get transferred to popular non-linear editors. Merlin works like a video picture desk, making most recent versions available immediately for editing in programs like Apple® Final Cut Pro, which is the non-linear editing program used at The Spokesman-Review.

Merlin's new web interface is optimized for video and audio playback. Users who need to view or hear content can use this tool to easily locate and play videos and audio files as well as view all print content. Projects, viewing linked content and saved searches are all available for even casual users.

Merlin's video asset management system integrates with popular transcoders for a quick, powerful and scalable way to convert media between virtually any video/audio format and automate workflow. Transcoder integration gives users the flexibility to normalize formats on ingest to Merlin or store videos in their original format and transcode when selecting destination newsroom systems.

About The Spokesman-Review - Produced by family-owned Cowles Publishing Co. of Spokane, The Spokesman-Review serves Eastern Washington and North Idaho and has a circulation of 97,000 daily and 123,000 Sunday.

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 management solution has over 140 major installations at corporations like The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, Harvard University, Pfizer, Habitat for Humanity and The White House. MerlinOne technology helps companies manage photos, text, graphics, PDFs, multimedia and e-discovery material.

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