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Hi, I'm David Breslauer, an application specialist at MerlinOne. I'd like to show you how Merlin
can easily handle any type of video file, in addition to the other types of multimedia
objects we've been archiving for years. Our customers have collectively stored hundreds
of millions of items in their Merlins, and now our new video functionality can turn Merlin
into an indispensable tool for finding video and an important part of any video workflow.
The Merlin system as a single integrated database that can manage millions of items regardless
of what they are. Photos, graphics, PDF pages, text and now video. And there are many ways
to find an organize that content. The most common way is to search for it. Searching
works because of metadata that is typically included with items, such as captions in photos,
or the text in a PDF or graphic. So let's open up Merlin's search window, and kickoff
our first search, looking for a recent story on MGM. Here are the results. We find photos,
pages, text stories, and even video objects in Merlin that contain MGM somewhere in the
page, text, caption or other metadata. Here's an MGM photo, this photo can be found because
MGM is included in both the instructions field and in the caption. Here's a PDF page, we
found it because MGM appears in a story on the page. And here's a video. The Merlin system
lets us search for spoken words, and the system found 5 hits of MGM in the audio track. The
display shows where the search term MGM falls in context, showing some of the surrounding
text. And it also shows us the timecode when it appears. That's because, in addition to
doing speech-to-text recognition Merlin Video indexes the spoken word with the timecode
of the video. As I click each hit you see the playhead advance and cue right up to the
point where the word MGM was spoken. Queuing like this would normally be a long tedious
job, particularly with tape. But with Merlin, we just click and we are there. "...stake
it already has in MGM Mirage, that could mean..." "...shares of MGM Mirage surged..." "...MGM
Mirage's board is now review..." Because Merlin automatically creates a proxy file, viewing
stored videos regardless of the original size and compression setting is fast, and there's
little impact on your network. Let's do another search for the word election. You can do proximity
searches, fuzzy searches, date and time searches, and so on. Here's the video. Imagine having
an hour long interview and somewhere in the middle there is a sound bite you were looking
for. How long would it take you to find the selection you want? With Merlin, the system
finds the selection, and with just one click, cues it up for immediate playback. This is
really powerful stuff! But you haven't seen anything yet. Let's take this to the next
logical level. Imagine you're doing a project on tigers. A search in Merlin yields photos,
graphics, audio and video files. This could be b-roll, documentaries, clips, scripts and
unscripted audio. In this case over three thousand items are found in under a second.
That alone is impressive. Examining one of the videos shows that the word tiger was spoken
5 times in the course of the video. Now this is where it really gets cool. Merlin has always
been about workflow, with a variety of production oriented tools. First, Merlin can be used
as an approval tool - marking items for evaluation, approval, or production. Or make your own
categories, using the same type of tools found in nonlinear editors, you can add markers
to the video with the keyboard command and add reference information associated with
the marker. You can also set in-and-out points, referencing portions of the clip you want
to use in your editing program. An editing pane in the Merlin client tracks item through
the approval process summarizing markers and edits. At any point, the video may be sent
it to a nonlinear editor. The markers and end points show up in your editing application,
so your clips are pre edited. I'd like to thank you for taking the time to check us
out. We look forward to hearing from you.