Linear Acoustic, RadiantGrid announce product collaboration

RadiantGrid Technologies, developer of transcoding, transformation and new media automation service platforms, is collaborating with Linear Acoustic, provider of TV audio control from content creation to transmission, to deliver new solutions for loudness and audio control in a file-based workflow. RadiantGrid’s transwrapping and transcoding capabilities have been combined with Linear Acoustic audio technology in the new Linear Acoustic AERO.file.

The AERO.file software solution, named an IBC2010 Pick Hit product by Broadcast Engineering, brings upmixing, downmixing, loudness range control and multipass scaling to RadiantGrid and, potentially, other file-based workflows without the need for outside hardware devices. AERO.file also supports audio transcoding between multichannel broadcast formats such as AC-3, Dolby E, AAC and Broadcast WAV (BWF).

RadiantGrid’s transwrapping functionality enables passage of video streams of any type, while re-encoding, applying loudness processing, upmixing or downmixing the audio sources via integrated Linear Acoustic AERO.qc processing. This is performed in a triple-pass approach, allowing for a first measurement of the entire program segment, a second pass for user-selected UPMAX-II upmixing and/or loudness range control, and then a final pass to ensure the results perfectly match the chosen target. This enables complete independence of loudness matching from other processing choices and guarantees the target is reached every time, while preserving the quality of the original content.

“Until now, when processing audio in a file-based workflow, customers only had the option of loudness scaling,” said Tim Carroll, founder and president of Linear Acoustic. “While simple scaling can produce loudness-matched segments, it may not go far enough for programs whose loudness range exceeds the target for a given channel. By combining the ultra-stable and flexible RadiantGrid transwrapping and TrueGrid transcoding technologies with our AERO.qc processing, users will be able to process audio while converting it to other file formats, all within one solution.”

RadiantGrid will also be adding these same new capabilities to the RadiantGrid Platform, giving users a full suite of tools to correct for loudness, upmix and downmix audio files, and transcode to a variety of file formats. RadiantGrid’s transwrapping function is also used here to allow the audio files to be processed while leaving the associated video files untouched.