Written by Axle AI and XenData have joined forces at NAB 2022 to combine AI powered media search and collaborative editing with highly scalable data storage solutions. By launching support within Axle AI 2022 for XenData’s X100 active archive, the companies’ are making it easier to manage and search large amounts of video.
The resulting combination of Axle Ai’s browser-based search, along with media management, AI tagging and Axledit’s editing platform with XenData’s robust back end storage facilities is ideal for creative video, medical imaging, video surveillance and other applications with high volumes of large files.
Axle ai’s media management software is deployed at over 800 customers worldwide, including leading media companies such as Paramount, Warner Bros, and NBC Universal. The X100 is powered by XenData Archive Series software which is trusted by over 1,500 organizations in over 90 countries, including many of the world’s largest media companies.
Dramatic industry consolidation over the last 18 months – with companies such as Masstech, Levels Beyond, CatDV, Primestream and DIVA being acquired – has left Axle AI and XenData in strong positions to provide high-capacity media storage applications to more companies in need of affordable solutions.
In addition to market changes, technology is having a rapid impact on the space. Traditionally, large media repositories have needed extensive manual tagging to make video, audio and image content searchable. Axle AI 2022 employs powerful machine learning to create rich metadata for media files, automatically. These include axle Speech (speech transcription for $1 per hour of footage), axle Tags (face recognition, object recognition and logo recognition), and axle OCR functionality to extract text from images and PDFs. This opens major new market segments to the Axle AI/XenData combination, ones which would have previously required prohibitive amounts of labor to make the video searchable.
Axle ai 2022 supports server configurations with Linux and MacOS as well as Windows (via VMware). Apple’s latest Mac Studio hardware, with 10 or 20 powerful CPU cores in a compact desktop package, is an ideal low-cost engine for deployments of Axle AI 2022. The media management solution accesses the Xendata X100 via 10 Gigabit Ethernet and XenData’s XML API, for a seamless user experience across the two products.
The streamlined, Axle AI 2022 user interface is accessed via the browsers of multiple users, who can search, manage and collaborate around huge media repositories without needing to know any technical details of how the back end is managed. In addition, the new axledit collaborative editing tool and Axle ai’s Premiere panel allow media to be dragged directly into the timeline of both cloud-based editing and traditional on-premise editing for Mac or Windows.
The X100 archive strongly adheres to standards. It supports writing to LTO cartridges using LTFS and writes to ODA cartridges using the Sony interchange standard. It fully supports the Microsoft security model based on Active Directory, making it easy to install in an existing Windows domain; likewise, Axle AI 2022 also supports Active Directory for user authentication.
Multiple X100 systems may be synchronized using XenData’s Multi-Site Sync service which links multiple archives in different locations, creating a single global file system accessible from anywhere. As soon as a file is archived to LTO or ODA at one location, it becomes available as a stub file within the global file system. When a user makes a change by writing, overwriting or deleting a file, that change is propagated to all locations. This provides a consistent up-to-date set of files across the entire distributed organization.
Sam Bogoch, Axle AI CEO, commented, “The design of the X100 is based on everything that we have learned from the 1500+ XenData archives that have been installed worldwide. It uses a simple architecture which takes advantage of the power of today’s multi-processor servers.”
If you’re going to be in Las Vegas for NAB 2022, stop by and say hello. Axle AI will be in booth N4816 and XenData booth N1516.