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In conversation with... Studio Hamburg and Hapag-Lloyd

 

"Great potential especially for the topic of accessibility"

 

Studio Hamburg Postproduction GmbH is one of the largest German production and service companies for film and television. They work for many major companies such as Hapag-Lloyd AG, a listed transport and logistics company and one of the world's leading liner shipping companies. Studio Hamburg is digitizing the film archive of Hapag Lloyd AG in postproduction.

A conversation with Martina Fähnemann, Corporate Communications/ Corporate Archive at Hapag-Lloyd and Robert Dittrich, Project Manager Film & Archive at Studio Hamburg:


What digital solutions for processing audio-visual content are you already using today?

Dittrich: We offer a comprehensive service for the postproduction of cinema and feature films, series, shows and documentaries. We also carry out full restorations and mass digitization of analog films. For this we use all kinds of hardware and software tools: From 4K film scanners to Nucoda grading suites, Nuendo audio suites to Clipster for transcoding AV material on our central storage of about 3 PB.

Fähnemann: We mainly use a cloud-based media asset database and use an archive database.


Most organizations have an ever-increasing amount of video and other digital content in their media archives. What do you think are the biggest challenges in managing, processing and using this content?

Dittrich: It's definitely metadata management. It's a very complex and time-consuming process.

Fähnemann: Assessing the "shelf life" and "future viability" of the various formats. The volumes of data and the effort required for distortion are also very large.


How can AI-driven transcription solutions be usefully employed and what are the advantages?

Dittrich: Automated transcription solutions facilitate the generation of metadata and can lead to a significant reduction in costs.

Fähnemann: In addition, they can certainly have a positive impact on the high personnel effort required for transcription.


For which fields of application do you see the greatest potential for the use of automated transcription?

Dittrich: The digitization of an entire archive with subsequent transcription to make the archive searchable as well as the easier creation of accessible content.

Fähnemann: I see great potential especially for the topic of accessibility. Automated transcription can make audio-visual content accessible to a wider audience.


In your opinion, what forms of accessibility are urgently needed in the media world?

Dittrich: HOH - subtitles for deaf and hard-of-hearing people and audio description, i.e. describing the content to be seen for visually impaired people.

Fähnemann: Automated subtitling of films and clips certainly makes sense for people who are hard of hearing or deaf on a larger scale than is offered today.

 

In your opinion, what are the greatest advantages of speech-to-text solutions and what are currently still the greatest difficulties in using STT solutions?

Fähnemann: Technical terms and the mixture of speech/dialects is certainly still a challenge - including the possibly complex quality control.

 

How do you work with aiconix and how do you use aiconix solutions?

Dittrich: When digitizing film archives, we are offering the automated transcription of the content by aiconix. For HAPAG-LLOYD, we recently digitized a significant portion of the company's archives and had them transcribed via aiconix.ai.


 

 

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