optical media

FTI Celebrates 15 Years in Business!

Falcon Technologies International (FTI) celebrated its 15th anniversary on 12th November 2020. FTI has established in the last 15 years, as world leader in the development & manufacturing of high-quality optical discs for Professional, Medical & Archival applications and continues to be the only producer of DL2P in the world & caters to customers in US, Europe & Japan. FTI has achieved the “best in the industry” benchmarks for manufacturing excellence. FTI has recently diversified into Additive Manufacturing (3D Printing) & set up one of the largest Polymer facility in Middle East.

The 15 year celebrations included speeches from Sanjay Gupta (CEO), Jude Alex (Department Manager HR) & Vishal Sharma (Head of Department-Production). Employees who completed 5, 10 and 15 years with FTI were presented the long service loyalty certificates and awards.
On behalf of the FTI Management Team we would like to thank all of our customers and partners worldwide for being with us all these years!

Falcon Technologies International hosts the Global Sales Managers and the Master Distributors on October 21-24

Falcon Technologies International recently hosted its Global Sales Managers and Master Distributors in its home Emirate of Ras Al Khaimah. We were delighted to welcome our Global Sales Managers responsible for the Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa and North-America territories together with our European Master Distributors (River Pro Audio – UK & Ireland, Media Range – Northern Continental Europe and Synoptic International – Southern Continental Europe) to discuss the latest developments, opportunities and innovations that make optical media the exciting and progressive industry that it is today. The entire FTI extended a very warm welcome to all the guests, who enjoyed the superb hospitality and fun activities including a Safari in Ras Al Khaimah desert.

Global Sales Managers and Master Distributors Meeting June 2018

FALCON TECHNOLOGIES INTERNATIONAL hosts The Global Sales Managers and the Master Distributors on June 25-28

Falcon Technologies International recently hosted its Global Sales Managers and Master Distributors in its home Emirate of Ras Al Khaimah.

We were delighted to welcome our Global Sales Managers responsible for the Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa and North-America territories together with our European Master Distributors (River Pro Audio – UK & Ireland, Media Range – Northern Continental Europe and Synoptic International – Southern Continental Europe) to discuss the latest developments, opportunities and innovations that make optical media the exciting and progressive industry that it is today.

The entire FTI extended a very warm welcome to all the guests, who enjoyed the superb hospitality and fun activities including a Karting race.

Falcon Technologies International unveils regional partnerships in new global distribution strategy.

Ras Al Khaimah, UAE, January 29th 2018 – Optical Media storage specialist Falcon Technologies International (FTI) has announced the formation of a number of key regional distribution partnerships in support of the company’s new worldwide strategy to increase sales and distribution via closer cooperation with the key players in the global optical media industry.

FTI’s new strategy is a pro-active step towards adapting to the shifting market dynamics of the optical media industry, which have evolved in the last 2 years towards consolidation into a smaller number of larger market players within all major territories globally.

In Europe, FTI has entered into distribution agreements with River Pro Audio to cover UK and Ireland, with Media Range to cover Northern Europe, and with Synoptic to cover Southern Europe. Each distribution partner has specialist knowledge and distribution networks in their respective territories and the existing, long-standing relationship each partner currently enjoys with FTI was a key factor in their selection as partners.

Within China, FTI has entered into an agreement with Yuen Data Technology Limited, who will serve as the official distributor of FTI archival, medical and professional products for the Chinese market. The partnership has been effective since January 2018.

FTI’s new distribution agreements come shortly after two other important news were announced; earlier this month FTI confirmed the opening of FTI US LLC to serve the dual functions of further improving its customer service to its North American customers, as well as gaining a larger footprint in the territory, and during 2017 FTI entered into an agreement with Verbatim to act as Verbatim’s exclusive distributor for their optical media products to countries in the Middle East.

FTI CEO Michael Gutowski said: “The optical media market has seen a number of partnerships and mergers take place in the last few years, and today we can see that the global future of the industry will be more heavily influenced by a smaller number of key companies as the sector moves towards a more consolidated position. FTI is one of those key market players, and given that our core strength is our professional focus and attitude, we have made the strategic decision to focus on being the number one global professional optical media manufacturer and made alliances with strategic distribution partners in our key market territories. This strategy will ensure that FTI is best positioned to take advantage of the current market consolidation and will place FTI’s products at the top of the scale as regards quality and reliability”.

Press Release – Falcon Technologies International to open a new branch office in North America.

Ras Al Khaimah, UAE, January 3^rd 2018 – Optical Media storage specialist Falcon Technologies International (FTI) has announced the opening of a new business unit and branch office to cover the North American market.

The new company, which is called FTI US LLC, has been established to support FTI’s growing portfolio of clients in North America, and to capitalize on their success in that market where FTI has been steadily increasing in awareness and market penetration as one of the key suppliers of quality optical media solutions to multiple industrial sectors.

FTI CEO Michael Gutowski said: “The USA has always been a very important market for FTI and our business operations have been established there as far back as 2007, however in line with the growth that FTI has experienced in many territories and especially in the USA, our existing market infrastructure in North America needed to be expanded to cope with growing customer demand. We have therefore set up FTI US LLC for precisely this purpose, which will serve the dual functions of continuing our customer service to our North American customers, as well as gaining a larger footprint in the territory.”

FTI US LLC will be represented by Fred Perez and his team, who has partnered with FTI since their entry to the North American market. FTI US LLC commenced operations officially on January 1st 2018.

What is sound mastering and why is it important for professional media duplication?

Modern sound recording industry as we know it today is a result of almost a century of continuous development and technical progress. We very often perceive it to be something that was around forever, and the high-quality FM broadcasts and live concert sound became something that is heard every day. Bot not many do actually think about the volume of work that stands behind that sound quality level.

The professional sound recording is a complex and multi-stage process that employs tens, and sometimes even hundreds of qualified professionals. One of the most important stages of this process is called mastering. You probably heard this term before. But what is sound mastering and why is it so important?

Broadly put, it’s both the final stage in the creative production of a track or album and the initial stage of its manufacture (where a physical product is concerned, such as a CD or vinyl) or output (ie, WAV/MP3 delivery to a download portal). In the early days of mass-produced music, it was the job of a skilled individual to physically transfer a final mix from tape to the ‘master’ vinyl record, which would then be sent for duplication.

As record labels realised that skilfully-applied processing could make a big difference in the perceived quality of music, mastering engineers were given more creative freedom to enhance mixes with equalisation and compression techniques. In today’s digital age, the mastering engineer is still essentially the middle-man between the finished mix and the consumer, correcting any ‘errors’ in the mix, making enhancements where needed, and editing/ submitting the final ‘master’ file for release – all without compromising the artistic vision of the original artist or creatively altering the mix.

So why doesn’t the mix engineer simply take on the task of mastering too? A mastered track should sound as good as possible on as many playback systems as possible, achieving a professional and consistent sound whether listened to on a car stereo, club sound system, cheap earphones, television, mobile phone, and so on. A producer or mix engineer has likely spent countless hours creatively blending multiple elements together to craft the final mix, and in doing so has ‘overlistened’ to the track in the same studio, which may not be the ideal listening environment. The mastering engineer is a final, experienced pair of ears that can objectively listen to the track, correct errors introduced by an imperfect mixing studio, and transparently sweeten a piece of music further.

Fans and listeners are used to hearing modern music coated with a professionally-mastered ‘sheen’ – sparkling highs, deep bass, consistent frequency spread and dynamic balance. Today’s songs and albums must compete with other professional records. A skilled mastering engineer has the equipment, experience, and ears to help a mix sit beside other commercial releases, adding that final 5-10% of polish.

Collections of individual tracks – whether destined for an EP, album or compilation – can each sound tonally and dynamically separate from each other. The mastering engineer will ensure the final collection of songs all sit together as a single cohesive product.

So basically, it is all about consistency and final polishing of the soundtrack. Sort of an additional quality assurance measure on the final stage of a master copy production, that is further on duplicated on a mass-production scale.

Quality of sound will also depend on the quality of the media storage it is recorded to. Therefore, choosing the right means of duplication is probably even more important than mastering itself.

Falcon Technologies International develops and produces professional optical media oriented towards different market sectors for more than 10 years now, and one of the sectors we prioritize, is media duplication.

Our FalconMEDIA DUPLI Line is a product that was tailored to meet the needs of professional media duplicators. It performs to good quality level with benchmark and quality control tests proving that DUPLI Line products have one of the lowest variability rates throughout the industry, which makes them a perfect solution for media duplication.

How National Archives are Going Digital

Paper was one of the humanity’s earliest means of data storage. Since its invention in China almost two thousand years ago, it is still one of the most important materials that we use in our daily activities: it is used as means of payment in form of cash, many important documents are still signed on paper, paper books are still more popular than the electronic ones and at the end of the day, don’t you still scribble your notes on the business meetings in a paper notebook?

Civilization used paper for centuries (and it will likely continue to do so for several more): our ancestors managed to leave us hundreds of thousands historical documents and books. From these sources, we are able to get the valuable information about important historical events and the way our ancestors lived. Paper allows us to see the footprint that previous generations have left in the history. It is a truly unique invention, as important and significant as the use of fire, iron and the wheel.

Nonetheless its undisputed value and role in the history of the mankind, paper have its weak side: it is not able to resist the influence of the environment. Old paper documents may corrode and the information recorded may gradually fade away and disappear over long periods of time. Before the invention of the first printing presses in XVth century, old manuscripts were copied manually in handwriting. Despite the complexity of that process, people understood the importance of preserving the information for future generations and some even dedicated a lifetime to restore the old manuscripts for the future generations.

Nowadays the technical progress allows us to archive the information in a more safe and simplified way: through digitalization and electronic archiving.

The Telangana State Archives and Research Institute of Hyderabad, India has come up with a proposal for a digital library placing online all its documents that include ‘farmans’ and gazettes issued by erstwhile rulers and also a rich collection of manuscripts. The proposal has already been submitted to the State government for approval.

Once in place, the digital library will come as a boon for researchers, teachers, and students apart from the general public who at present have to go through a cumbersome manual process to check the material of their interest.

“Now, whenever a researcher or student approaches us, we take their request and locate the papers and hand them over. With the proposed system, students coming for research can view the information on computers connected to the server,” said a senior official.

The process has already been initiated and the institute has digitized more than 60 folios which are to be made available to the public through the digital library. The digitized content includes ‘farmans’, gazettes and manuscripts that were issued at different points of time by the then rulers. The impressive collection at the State Archives and Research Institute has thousands of documents related to the Moghal rule while the oldest document preserved here dates back to the year 1406 pertaining to Adil Shah.

Every year, researchers from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and Singapore among other countries visit the Institute for research.

Digital archiving has an important role in historical data preservation: as paper manuscripts and important historical documents are decaying under the influence of temperature, pressure and humidity fluctuations, there is always a risk of data loss. Therefore, digitalization becomes a must, rather than an option.

Just think about it: if the medieval monks would not copy the manuscripts back in the day, we would probably never know about some of the major historical events and scientific discoveries.

We at Falcon Technologies International understand the importance of historical data preservation. It is hard to underestimate the importance of these materials in the context of the history of the civilization. That was one of the ideas behind the development of FalconMEDIA Century Archival Disc – an optical media storage device, that is able to store data for centuries. Manufactured with use of gold and platinum layers technology, it is able to serve as a reliable and secure long-term data vault.

Source: Telangana Today

Next Generation of Optical Media is coming with the Archival Disc

Next generation of the optical disc is announced to be launched in the nearest future. The maximum data storage capacity on a single optical disc that is available on the market now is up to 500 GB, and the new format is going to be able to store twice of that.

The discs are called ‘Archival disc’ and it is claimed that the storage unit can retain its data for more than a 100 years.

Higher capacities in optical storage are made possible due to smaller sized pits and marks and shorter wavelength lasers and improved drawing rates. In the case of the ‘Archival Discs’ alternative approach is used: extra data is recorded on the land areas between grooves that are traditionally unused.

Optical discs have great potential to further enhance their recording density and storage capacity with technological advancements in, for example, signal processing technology. If we compare the growth in the recording density of HDDs, optical discs, and magnetic tapes, in 10 years, from 2016 to 2026, the recording density will improve by 7~15% for HDDs and 30~46% for optical discs. For the magnetic tapes, the increase is estimated to be less than 30%. To estimate the longevity of the media, industry standard acceleration tests were conducted. Error occurrence rates were measured in temperatures 30℃ and above and in less than 70% humidity. These tests estimate that the prototypes of the Archive Discs can reliably store data for more than 100 years. On the other hand, hard disks have a lifespan of a few years, and magnetic tapes a dozen or so years.

Because optical discs have a long life, unlike hard disks and magnetic tapes, there is no need to regularly migrate data from degraded media to new media. Moreover, optical discs do not require operations or cooling of facilities that are associated with hard disks, therefore, long-term storing of data on optical discs can reduce power consumed as well as costs incurred. If 1PB (petabyte) of data is stored for 20 years on HDDs, magnetic tapes, and optical discs, with widely available HDDs and magnetic tapes, the costs come out to be around the same, whereas with optical discs, it is estimated that the data could be stored at half the cost.

Another technology used on the Archival Discs is,”Crosstalk-cancelling technology”. This technology cancels crosstalk noise generated by adjacent tracks. This should ensure playback quality without read errors, even with narrow track pitches.

Falcon Technologies International is constantly monitoring the overall trends of the optical media market and tends to allocate its resources towards innovation and improvement of its professional product lines, in particular, the Century Archival, which is a cutting-edge technology, built with Gold or Platinum layer to ensure maximum security, longevity and protection for stored data proven by a number of internal and independent third-party tests.

Source: guru3d