Brief introduction:Video cloud drives innovation of intelligence media

May 27, CCBN (the 28th China International Radio and Television Information Network Exhibition) was held in Beijing, in this “CCBN annual innovation award” selection, Ali cloud video cloud with AI editorial department of the media industry professional solutions won the CCBN product innovation outstanding award.

With the development of technology, the innovation and application of 5G, 4K, AI and other new technologies have become the consensus of the transformation of the media industry. In the face of 986 million mobile Internet users, it has become the development trend of the media industry to give full play to the advantages of 5G network technology and build an omnimemedia distribution system integrating mobile phone small screen and TV large screen. In the new form of communication, users are more inclined to personalized audio-visual needs, which brings new requirements and challenges to the media industry content production time and production output. How to use artificial intelligence and data technology to improve the production efficiency and production output of video has become one of the key tasks in the media convergence transformation of AI Editorial Department.

Production is the core of the whole production and broadcast process, which connects the collection, broadcast and storage. Only after the production process is fully cloud, can the efficiency of integrated media really be improved. In the whole process of production and broadcast of integrated media, the newly upgraded AI Editorial 2.0 integrates short video production and high-bit-rate editing. Through the extensive use of AI technology, it realizes two-way interaction and integrated production of large and small screens. At the same time, the integration of cloud and end collaborative production mode, accelerate the efficiency of the entire content production.

In terms of practical operation, AI Editorial Department achieves this goal through three subdivisions: real 4K cloud production, 4K video enhancement, and cloud fusion medium short video production:

First of all, in terms of the infrastructure of 4K cloud production, the main innovation made by AI editorial department is the introduction of SCC high-performance computing and CPFS parallel file system. According to the high performance requirements of cloud production, low delay interconnection between computing nodes and storage nodes is realized to meet better production experience, while avoiding the loss of virtualization and further improving performance. For the high storage capacity and bandwidth requirements of cloud production, CPFS provides linear scaling throughput capacity with storage nodes, with a maximum throughput capacity of 300Gb /s for a single cluster. The AI Editorial Department provides abundant resources suitable for media business, including various personalized hardware devices such as FPGA and GPU, to meet different business demands. In addition, AI Editorial Department has carried out a lot of optimization for GPU, including virtualization, sharing and reddisation of GPU, which can greatly improve the utilization rate of GPU and reduce the cost of cloud production.

Secondly, in the aspect of 4K video enhancement, AI Editorial Department mainly uses three core technologies of video superpartition, video insertion and color enhancement to comprehensively improve the picture quality of 1080p and lower quality videos, and meet the requirements of ultra-high definition video in three aspects of frame rate, resolution and color. The 4K enhanced capabilities provided by the AI Editorial Department not only meet the professional standards, that is, the standard definition in the Guidance for the Implementation of 4K Ultra High Definition Television Program Production Technology, but also meet the professional technical audit and supervision requirements in the industry. While meeting the objective parameter standards, the subjective visual experience has been significantly improved. These include detail restoration, noise suppression, picture smoothness, video brightness, color contrast and shading detail retention. In the aspect of AI video superpartition, the AI editing department adopts the way of deep learning to losslessly enlarge the picture, which can achieve a four-fold increase in resolution. While repairing and restoring details such as portrait and scene, it can suppress block noise, compression noise and other damage to the picture quality, and make the picture sharper. The AI Editorial Department innovatively proposed the enhancement of key parts to achieve the most effect at the minimum cost, such as focusing on the optimization of the face of the portrait, to achieve better restoration and restoration of the skin texture and hair details of people.

Finally, the AI Editorial Department has the following five core advantages in the production of short videos on cloud fusion media, combining the current hot spots of short videos and users’ preferences, and starting from the foothold of making short videos:

1. The AI Editorial Department provides powerful prediction and evaluation capabilities to help editors judge what kind of short videos to make and make targeted productions.

2. The AI Editorial Department provides a powerful multi-modal tagging capability to redefine the content of the video. It makes use of image, voice, text and other AI capabilities to systematize the generation of tags.

3. To address the pain points of retrieval, AI Editorial Department provides powerful multimodal retrieval, including text search, picture search, video search, as well as multi-modal retrieval capabilities supporting natural speech understanding, knowledge map and other whole processes.

4. Provide massive and multi-category video templates to produce a large number of professional short videos in a short time.

5. The AI Editorial Department provides rich and professional intelligent auxiliary tools, which can meet the demand of quick short video production in scene.

Since the release of AI Editorial Department 2.0, the Technology Department of People’s Daily has combined with Aliyun Video Cloud to apply this capability to the content production of the NPC and CPPCC sessions. AI technology of Aliyun has been adopted, and AI application innovation has been carried out by combining the business scenes of People’s Daily with massive data training of People’s Daily. The AI editorial department “can see, listen, understand and check”, which can realize the automatic, mass and intelligent production of all kinds of new media products, and realize the functions of multi-modal retrieval, intelligent cleaning and intelligent video production, greatly improving the efficiency of news production and comprehensively contributing to the reporting of the NPC and CPPCC sessions of People’s Daily. After constant iteration and improvement, on the eve of the two sessions in 2021, Ali Cloud Video Cloud will comprehensively upgrade its functions for the AI Intelligence Editorial Department of People’s Daily, integrate five new AI capabilities, and help the newspaper to improve the quality and efficiency of all media coverage of the two sessions.

In the past, the AI editorial department used professional equipment locally for high-definition video production.

Today, AI newsrooms use IP, intensification, and virtualization to decouple professional equipment from production software.

In the future, through the AI Editorial Department, Ali Cloud Video Cloud will cooperate with more partners, use big data and artificial intelligence technology, provide remote, interactive and intelligent cloud production capacity, complete more imaginable business scenarios, and help the digital transformation and upgrading of the media industry.

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