Written by Axle AI affordable automated visual tagging of video lifts productivity; eliminates key barrier to adoption
Axle AI, leaders in harnessing the power of artificial intelligence for video workgroups, today announced immediate availability of integration between their revolutionary Axle AI software and Microsoft Video Indexer. Axle AI now uses the Video Indexer service to automatically tag entire video files, and segments of those videos, with descriptions of the visual contents of those files and text transcriptions of the spoken content of the videos. Axle AI will be demonstrated at the Axle Video stand, Hall 7.F04, at this week’s IBC conference.
Axle AI represents a breakthrough in capability for small and midsize video teams. Previously, organizations had to purchase expensive systems costing tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, then spend further on labor to manually tag the material that they planned to search. While Axle AI preserves the option of manual tagging and highlighting of clips, the majority of the up-front work is done by machine intelligence, at far lower cost and much higher speed than was possible in the past. This has the effect of making tens or hundreds of terabytes of previously un-searchable footage, immediately searchable.
Video Indexer is able to automatically compute a variety of key information about video footage, including using facial recognition to identify who is in a given video segment, what objects are in the segment, and also what words and sentences are being spoken. The Axle AI integration pulls the resulting metadata from the Video Indexer service, and displays It in Axle’s radically simple media management UI, which works with all major web browsers.
Sam Bogoch, CEO of Axle Video, stated “Microsoft has provided a complete and robust cloud AI back end, including object and scene recognition, face recognition, and speech to text conversion. By feeding all of the metadata generated by these tools into our simple, approachable front end, we can provide our customers with the key insights into their media that will make them vastly more productive.”
Kunal Malhotra, Product Marketing Manager, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Corp. said, “We are pleased to see Axle AI benefit from the visual management capabilities of Microsoft Video Indexer. Axle’s focus on making application management capabilities widely available supports our mutual customers in a variety of industries by adding value to their video content.”
Benefits
Studies show that up to 40% of video postproduction time is spent simply finding the best footage for a given project. In addition, inability to find the right clip can often result in expensive re-shoots (B-roll segments for example) causing costs to escalate even further. By solving these problems, Axle has large benefits for the over 250,000 small and midsize postproduction teams worldwide.
How it works
Axle AI’s cataloging engine first makes low-resolution versions of each file, and the resulting versions are uploaded to Microsoft Azure Storage and processing systems in the cloud for further analysis. The metadata generated by this analysis is returned seamlessly to Axle’s solution, which both places it in an open database back end, and puts it at users’ fingertips using advanced Elastic Search technology.
Pricing and availability
The Axle AI module which connects to Video Indexer is available immediately for Axle customers with Microsoft Azure accounts; pricing of the interface is $1,995 (purchase with first year’s updates) or $99/month SaaS pricing as part of Axle’s new cloud offerings. Microsoft Azure charges for the Video Indexer service are assessed separately.
About Axle Video
Axle AI is the newest offering from Axle Video, LLC, a Boston-based company, founded in 2012, which seeks to make media management radically simple and affordable. Since its founding, the company has received multiple awards including Best of Show at IBC in 2012 and Best of Show at NAB in 2013. Axle’s CEO, Sam Bogoch, was the author of the Media Asset Management chapter of the SBE’s Broadcast Engineering Handbook in 2016; his prior job was as Director of Product Management for Avid’s Interplay Production and Media Central solutions from 2007-2012. The company has over 400 customer sites worldwide, including Reuters, the BBC, Reebok, CBS News, Baylor University, VMware, and music recording star Kenny Chesney.