Case Study
VERSUS
VERSUS, a national sports network in more than 75 million homes required an HD/SD archive as a key element of its tapeless production workflow. With live footage coming into the facility from a number of high-profile sporting events and more than 40,000 tapes taking up valuable real-estate space and draining resources, VERSUS looked to a number of suppliers to provide a tapeless production workflow that could simplify production and archive procedures, give back valuable space within the facility and significantly reduce costs. VERSUS required an extremely reliable solution with seamless integration. As Paul Koopmann, VERSUS Director of Engineering points out, "We didn't want to have to create our own wheel to make this happen. To have 40,000 tapes sitting in our building that we can't physically get to and that take hours to digitise is not economically viable. There's also the issue of tapes getting lost. The amount of money that it took to maintain a 40,000 tape library onsite was astronomical."
Solution
VERSUS appointed SGL and Avid to solve the facility's data needs for on-air and post production, while using MediaKive, a company based in New Hampshire, to digitize old content into the newly created SGL/Avid solution. VERSUS sends in the region of 1000 tapes per month to MediaKive, the digitized content is then encoded in an MXF file format (DV50), and wrapped with the metadata extracted from VERSUS' library management system - Nesbit. When the media comes back to VERSUS it is delivered on 1TB E-SATA drives with approximately two hundred hours of content on each drive. Material is both HD and SD - the majority being SD because of the vast amount of archival footage. Back at VERSUS the drives are mounted to a consolidation machine. The media is consolidated to Avid and is transcoded to a low res 1.5 M/bit MPEG 2 proxy and checked into Interplay. The proxy workspace within Interplay means that material can be edited online in low res with the high resolution media pushed through SGL's FlashNet to a SpectraLogic T950 robot.
Koopmann explains, "We also have 8TB of nearline storage, which is held as a cache so that media can be retrieved quickly. Our editors can pull media from the nearline rather than retrieving from the archive, which has been a really great process for us because it speeds up the archiving and retrieval rates tremendously."
Interplay provides VERSUS with an entire asset management system. Koopmann says, "Having Interplay as our master library gives us the ability to browse the media with Assist or Access but edit with Avid Media Composer, Avid Symphony DX or by utilising the Avid AirSpeed and this really is the brain behind everything that we are doing. It's an extremely efficient database and the beauty in how well Interplay works with SGL FlashNet is amazing. I am very impressed with the bonds that have been created between SGL and Avid. I think that having these two companies work so closely together to make this an efficient workflow has revolutionised how we do business at VERSUS."
As well as ingesting the drives from MediaKive, VERSUS also ingests live footage from live sporting events such as NHL games, IndyCar® Series events and Professional Bull Riders competitions, which is handled by EVS or Avid AirSpeed. Once ingested, all the live footage is again transcoded to the proxy and the high res material is immediately pushed to the SpectraLogic robot via FlashNet. Koopmann explains, "An editor who is putting together a piece on NHL, can retrieve the high resolution content from the nearline - through SGL's tight integration with Avid partial file restore - this process is extremely quick regardless of when the media was archived. It helps the bandwidth process and manages the media that we have. We actually anticipate growing our nearline solution tremendously, simply because of the efficiencies of having the high res material on hand. It's a very valuable piece to the puzzle."
He adds, "The integration of the nearline cache into the Avid environment is seamless. We don't have to manage the SGL component in Interplay it just works seamlessly, it's not like a whole other appliance or database that we have to go in and tweak or modify. It talks to Avid, it talks to Spectralogic, it's a beautiful open system that has really created a lot of efficiencies for us."
VERSUS content is edited on the fourth floor of the network's Stamford, Conn. facility and its live production studio is based on the first floor. Any footage that comes in whether it's through an EVS or AirSpeed is packaged on the fourth floor and then sent back down to the live studio through an EVS transfer. Material is then available for instant playout for the live studio show.
Result
Over 15,000 hours of HD and SD content have been checked into Avid's Interplay system and archived through FlashNet to SpectraLogic's T950 LTO4 tapes in under a year. The modest sized system supplied to VERSUS by SGL archives at a speed approaching 200MBits/s, four times faster than real time - a small system delivering exceptional throughput. This media conveyor belt project has paid for itself by reducing tape stock, post/production labour, reclamation of valuable real estate, and delivery of digital content to all departments at VERSUS and all screens (TV, Web, mobile).
The cost reduction has been significant for VERSUS. Koopmann concludes, “Broadcasters simply cannot afford to throw their tape out. Tape is our asset; it's our bread and butter. The problem that we are faced with is the cost to manage the content, and in a tape-based world that cost is exponential - the more tapes the more cost and the more times you use those tapes the costs increase further. If you start to calculate what it costs to have one tape on a shelf in your facility on an annual basis calculated by the price per square foot for rent and then you factor in environmental costs, real estate taxes, librarians and shelving costs you come up with a tangible figure on an annual basis, which is never represented on any budget anywhere. You then say, now I want to use that tape twice or three times in a year and every time you touch that tape and move it into a tape machine you add on VTR maintenance costs, you add on digitising time, you add on tracking time and lost time of the edit room, it starts costing you tremendous amounts of money for that one tape. This is an operational cost that is not represented on any budget in any broadcast facility anywhere in the world!"
With this new workflow, content is free for VERSUS to use on an annual operational basis forever. Not only can the facility use it in its post and production area, it can use it for new media, VOD web group - everybody can see, touch, and play with that media.
This new workflow has also completely revolutionised the network's production processes delivering a flawless performance. The Avid Interplay system works seamlessly with SGL's FlashNet providing a tight integration that has reduced bottlenecks and improved VERSUS' production workflow. The network's post and production teams can search this metadata-rich content instantly, locating clips that would have normally taken hours to find on tape. SGL's ability to provide seamless integration with third-party systems means that networks such as VERSUS can build a sophisticated workflow that can continue to grow as the facility expands.
VERSUS was originally launched as Outdoor Life Network (OLN) in July 1995 and at that time focused almost exclusively on fishing, hunting, and other related outdoor sports. In September 2006 the network changed its name and re-branded to VERSUS.
Currently in more than 75 million homes, VERSUS is the exclusive cable television home of the National Hockey League (NHL), IndyCar® Series, Tour de France, World Extreme Cagefighting® (WEC®) and Professional Bull Riders (PBR).
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