Grass Valley has grown through acquisition of several companies to now offer a very wide range product portfolio including products for live production, production, playout, processing and routing. For content management in production they offer the GV STATUS (which the marketing focuses on newsroom production) and the newer Momentum product. This review focuses on the latest Grass Valley Momentum product for its media asset management and workflow functionality. This is likely to have a wider application in the media supply chain than STRATUS.

ARCHITECTURE: Momentum has a SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and web services architecture (on dual redundant Microsoft cluster). All user interfaces are web browser based. It uses an Oracle database (on dual redundant RAC cluster). Virtualization is supported. No mention of cloud, so assume deployed only on-prem. No mention of content security.

INTEGRATION: Momentum offers integration Nodes. Nodes are limited, with only 22 device drivers for third-party devices. These include all leading AQC, transcoders and archive resources. NLE integration is with Final Cut, Premiere and Go! No mention is made of the integration approach or the support for integration through scripting.

AUTOMATION: Momentum provides a graphical workflow design tool (with a nice zoom function) with which to link together automatic QC, manual review and transcode functions. Workflows can include unlimited nodes and multiple paths. Workflows can be launched from within workflows. Human tasks can be included, with task list management and email alerts. No mention is made of supporting custom scripted nodes, nor of real-time workflow monitoring.

METADATA: Momentum claims an extensible database schema for unlimited descriptive metadata. Technical metadata is automatically populated from file analysis. User-defined categories are supported to group media types. Workflows can be configured to automatically add or extract metadata. Metadata can be exchanged using Harris Data Import and BXF metadata protocols. No self-help metadata design tool is mentioned though, nor the use of more advanced metadata like taxonomies, thesaurus etc.

USER EXPERIENCE: The Momentum user interface is a modern style, but feels cluttered. Although access control limits the ability to access full UIs, there is no mention of configurability within any UI by individual or group. Human resource task management is provided, as set by workflows. Video, multiple audio track and captions supported.

ANALYTICS: Momentum is provided with a statistical reporting and analysis tool that displays “essential system performance data visually, including waiting time, processing time, bottlenecks and peak usage”. It can also display charts visualising workflows and user activity. Reporting metadata can be accessed by third party applications through a web services API.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: At the time of writing this review, we can find no mention of integration to AI video indexing services or built-in AI capability in any of the Grass Valley marketing material reviewed.