Cost-effective

Medway is proven to be extremely cost effective. By realising workflow efficiencies, workflows that are not otherwise possible, Medway invariably recovers resources through workflow transformation, speeds up processes and makes them more reliable. It makes businesses more agile and new services are quick and simple to deploy.

Secure

It’s extremely unlikely that modern production infrastructure is not exposed to the internet and therefore security is a major consideration. It’s a challenge meeting INFOSEC requirements alongside speed of operations, such as news or sports workflows, but we can use Medway’s inherent speed and ability to process open files and sequences ‘on the fly’. Installing a second Medway in a network DMZ, for example, enables fast continuous transfer of files and sequences. Medway won’t transfer files that are not recognised within the prescribed workflows or not formatted correctly, such as encrypted files. For additional protection, the DMZ Medway can be directly connected via network acceleration tools, such as Signiant, Aspera and File Catalyst.

Fast

All Medway processing and transfer is in memory and compute, with no media ever cached to local disk. Medway is usually only constrained by the available network bandwidth and the read/write speed of externally connected systems. Medway is bi-directional and supports multiple concurrent streams.

Technology partners

Customers choose best of breed systems from multiple vendors, which often don't integrate well. There may be expensive ‘bodges’ required between systems, where quality, speed, reliability, metadata or genealogy are compromised. Medway acts as the impartial intermediary between these systems, allowing fully featured connectivity to be preserved. We are technology partners with Avid, Adobe, Apple, Grass Valley, Ross and EVS, plus almost all MAM archive and storage vendors.

Back-to-the-future codec library

Medway supports almost all contemporary professional codecs and the library of supported codecs continually grows. Medway can also transcode, has motion compensated de-interlace, re-interlace and re-scaling, with all processing occuring on the fly within the software. Importantly Medway supports many older proprietary codecs, such as LXF, GXF, etc. Why is this important? Many archives use legacy codecs, which modern production systems cannot support, and so Medway can be used to automate mass library migration, such as from LTO to cloud. Using Medway means proprietary legacy content is converted and preserved at the highest possible quality, migrating to modern non-proprietary codecs.

Innovative workflows

Medway innovation continues to accelerate. In the past year, we've developed connectors for Sony C3 Portal and Sony Ci Media; a LiveU connector for field acquisition; LucidLink for remote multi-resolution editing; and a Medway panel for within Avid Media Composer for Avid | Edit On Demand. Medway workflows can be easily triggered and controlled by external systems to create powerful logical workflows bringing disparate systems together. Using connectors, workflows can extend into third party systems. 

Off-the-shelf connectivity

Medway has a large library of off-the-shelf generic and vendor-specific connectors, developed and tested in conjunction with the manufacturers. Deployment can be fast, with straightforward configuration and metadata mapping. The connector library includes standard connectors for S3, allowing support for almost all cloud and on-prem object storage systems in addition to native support for generic disk based storage. The library continues to grow; latest additions include connectors for LucidLink, LiveU, Sony Ci Media and Sony C3 Portal. We've also developed a Medway panel for Avid Media Composer.

Agile and resilient

Medway isn’t bound to a single workflow but can run multiple concurrent workflows, plus can be partitioned so that a service provider can service multiple clients from the same system. The Medway server is highly reliable and includes control software. However, as a single system cannot protect against hardware failure, a redundant controller option provides 100% resilience and automatic fail-over. The controller manages fail-over of other Medway components including Medway servers and additional transfer engines; fail-over is automatic, requiring no manual intervention. In the event of a power outage, Medway will also restore service automatically.

Scalable and interoperable

Medway easily scales, allowing the management of the throughput required for large enterprise customers. The system can be distributed across locations and also hosted in the cloud, running on-prem servers, VM servers or in-cloud services such as AWS or Azure. The Medway software is standard for all deployments, providing integration to third-party systems and services – such as MAM, PAM and archive edit systems – achieved through a library of certified vendor-specific and generic connectors.

Our own software

All Marquis software is written in-house by our developers, who each have a fundamental understanding of broadcast and media technology. Our quality-checking is second to none and all products are supported by an exceptional support team – just ask our existing customers!

Exceptional support

Our support team are some of the most experienced engineers in the business, supporting the world's largest media companies. As middleware, Medway is inherently in the midst of critical workflows. While it's extremely rare to have any problem with Medway software, it generates extensive logs of all processes. Invariably, we find issues are caused by external changes in networks ports, permissions, firewall or corrupted files – we simply help diagnose the faults, allowing operations to move forward.

In-house test lab

We test both functionality and interoperability in our lab, where we maintain many third-party test systems. We integrate and test the latest systems, plus keep a library of legacy integrations (and connectors) for legacy system testing. This enables clients with servers that are no longer supported by the original vendor to enable an automated migration to new systems.

Metadata is fundamental to the downstream use and exploitation of content – below is an illustration of the 'user visible' metadata available. Commissioning, rights and creation data are automatically embedded and continue downstream, so the genealogy can be tracked wherever this content is subsequently used; unlike some news field link technologies, none of the metadata is stripped off.

Metadata

In the example of the Sony C3 Portal to Avid MediaCentral metadata workflow above, commissioning, rights and creation data are automatically embedded and continue downstream, so the genealogy can be tracked wherever this content is subsequently used. Unlike with some news field link technologies, none of the metadata is stripped off.

A notion of sequences

Sequences are the component parts of the edit. When an edit is finished, the file is usually flattened to provide a single contiguous file for publication. However, it is very useful to be able to interoperate sequences between management systems. Medway enables advanced multi-resolution sequence processing, intelligently parsing each sequence so only the required media is transferred with the sequence. This makes the sequence processing fast and highly efficient.

Maintaining genealogy

In the metadata diagram above, we describe a very rich set of metadata. Edits will often contain content from multiple sources, each with unique metadata, rights and usage restrictions. Medway maintains genealogy data associated with each discreet element of the sequence. The sequence genealogy data may be a useful data source for other process such as populating music cue sheets, archives, MAM, PAM and rights management systems.