Some benefits of the file-based quality control are:

• detecting VTR and medium problems
• ensuring video essence quality during archive master ingest
• estimation of the restoration effort for specific content
• selecting archived content for re-use by quality properties

The significant automation of visual quality assessment is done in a three-step approach. In the first step, video content is analyzed automatically; visual impairments like video breakup, digital tape dropout, blurriness and noise are tested against user-defined criteria and thresholds. Then all information about a file is gathered in its accompanying metadata, and this can be used for automatic filtering in a second step. All files below user-definable thresholds for certain metadata criteria pass through automatically, while files exceeding these thresholds will be presented to operators for manual control in the third step: verification of the gathered information, which is done using an efficient and streamlined user interface enabling job-time optimization. The result is a human verified quality report, also present in a machine-readable xml format for exchange with e.g. MAM systems. Automated processes are applied in appropriate situations; manual processes where defined.

The deep file-based Quality Analysis of video information requires a lot of processing resources. This is solved by using an additional GPU processing card. Depending on the available QC resources not all incoming files require to be deeply checked. The QC events generated during the QUADRIGA ingest process can be used to create rules to select suspected files for deep file based checking.