SONIC Foundry, based out of Madison, Wis., is a player in the world of standards conversion – thanks in part to a little Canadian know-how. Last August, SF completed the purchase of International Image, a Toronto-based service provider for the managing and digitizing of media for the entertainment industry.

‘For example, when Alliance Atlantis [Communications] completed a TV series for Canada, International Image created all the foreign versions to satisfy AAC’s international sales,’ explains Curtis Staples, VP media services development, Sonic Foundry.

A self-described ‘cyber guy,’ Staples divides his time between his home of Vancouver and California, where SF has two Santa Monica locations. The company’s overall business includes development and marketing of digital media and Internet software tools, services and systems for multimedia, Web, music, video, broadcasting and digital content creation.

If that AAC show was being delivered to the U.S., which, as with Canada, employs the NTSC system, format conversion would obviously not be needed, but other elements might have to be changed.

‘There’s probably going to be something different about it, such as commercial lengths,’ Staples says. ‘Rarely is it an exact clone.’

He points to the example of Sonic Foundry preparing more than 50 versions of The X-Files each week. Despite recent technological advances, Staples maintains that the focus of International Image did not really change after it opened its doors in 1983.

‘At the root, the business International Image was in was the re-purposing of content to satisfy delivery,’ Staples says. ‘Sitting in the vault would be X, and some process had to be applied to it to turn it into a Y that somebody wanted to buy.’

But turning Xs into Ys has become all the more complicated with the increasing number of distribution channels needed to satisfy sales in a globalized entertainment industry. And there are more formats feeding these new distribution avenues.

Staples believes that if we are to accept the notion of convergence – that the various media delivery platforms are coming together – then cable, VHS/DVD and over-the-air delivery to the home must be thought of in the same grouping as satellite, wireless and Internet.

‘We’re in the middle of a 20-year transition,’ he says. ‘If you go back to the 1960s, there was a time when people were saying ‘Let’s watch cable,’ and we had this toggle that switched from the antenna on the roof to cable. Nobody says that anymore, because all you do is you watch TV, and nobody thinks about how the signal is getting there.’

In the wired age, Staples points to various forms of streaming and video on demand file distribution over the Internet, yet acknowledges the public will probably never want to watch long-form entertainment on their computer screens. However this form of data delivery, using, for example, a satellite by-pass network and an ISP Last Mile to get to viewers’ homes, will eventually carry programs to TV set-top boxes.

Along came digital

Although the concept of what conversion companies do has remained the same, the process has changed.

‘In our business, if you go back 20 years, the only thing to do was take one-inch video tape in NTSC and convert it to one-inch video tape in [the European standard of] PAL,’ Staples explains. ‘Then along came D2, D1, Digital BetaCam, etc., and the matrix grew from a one-to-one to a five-things-in, five-things-out. [Next] came streams – MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, Real, Windows Media Player, and QuickTime. Now you have 12-to-12, and because the stream can be any bit-rate you choose, you have an unending number of streams out.’

Staples insists Sonic Foundry is format-agnostic, and cares no more about what kind of technology it is working with than a builder of roads would care about the types of vehicles riding on his freeway.

‘What we’re building is not resting on MPEG1, MPEG2, D1 or D17,’ he says. ‘We’re in the re-purposing business. Give us one thing and we’ll create something else on behalf of the people who own the content so they can sell it.’

SF employs its ImageFIT 625 technology to convert NTSC to PAL masters for distribution via DVD, Internet, digital satellite, digital cable, and video-on-demand for TVs and PCs. These distribution channels require MPEG compression, which in PAL format necessitates film-originated content be field-one dominant at all edits. According to SF, its conversion technology is the only one that can achieve this.

This new enhancement makes ImageFIT 625 compatible with SF’s ImageFIT 525 NTSC mastering technology, thereby allowing for the conversion of film-originated content to and from NTSC and PAL. SF sees this compatibility as essential in an era with a growing number of international copros and buy-backs of foreign language versions.

-www.sonicfoundry.com