As-11 playback and eye ball checks

AS-11 Playback

Once you have an AS-11 file which has passed all your technical compliance tests, you may well still need to have the file viewed by the production to complete the eye ball check.

This 'viewing' process is to do with ensuring spellings are correct, the right caption is over the right people, MediaOffline doesn't go to air or indeed that there are no inappropriate imagery at the back of shot, all of which are things that will not be picked up by an automated QC process. Ultimately the content is the responsibility of the production so this is why it has been passed back to them in this eyeball process.

In most cases it will be necessary to use something like an Avid to link back to the As-11 files to play it back for the eyeball process. However , it may well be that is can't be done and an alternative process needs to be adopted.

Step up (yet again) VLC. This robust little player will quite happily playback .mxf files and as the AS-11 file is an AVCIntra-100Mbs codec which is in essence a h264 MPEG stream, the file can be playback on a responsibly powerful desktop machine.

Care should be taken with the playback as line tearing can occur and image quality will vary, but this may well be a suitable alternative at zero cost!?

There are obvisouly system such as Teks Cerify that can offer playback, but this has a hefty cost to it and isn't something that can be introduced as a spur of the moment alternative.