42 TVBEurope London 2012 Countdown
Televisareaches Olympic heights
withSienna workflow
New technology to enable efficiency and reduce location staff numbers, writesMelanie Dayasena-Lowe
AS BROADCASTERS around the world prepare for the London Olympics later this month, Gallery Sienna has an interesting remote workflow solution up its sleeve aiming to help reduce costs and headcount needed at the host location. Working with systems
integrator Simplemente for the world’s largest Spanish language broadcaster Televisa, Gallery Sienna has devised a fully remote edit/logging workflow. It has partnered with AJA, Apple, Active Storage, Promise and Sonnet in the new Olympics infrastructure for Televisa. Gallery Sienna has worked with Simplemente for about 15 years and began working with Televisa a year before the Beijing Olympics. “Before the Beijing Olympics, Gallery Sienna was approached by the BBC originally to ask if our ingest channels could work over a WAN,” said CTO Mark Gilbert. “We knew nothing about
latency five-to-six years ago and it was a great learning process for us because suddenly we became aware of the practical problems. Even before the Beijing Olympics, Gallery Sienna started developing technologies for WAN acceleration across the different layers.” So how does Sienna’s WAN
acceleration system differ from Aspera or Signiant? “The difference with those tools is that they’re primarily designed to take a finished file and move it from one location to another. With Sienna you can move a ‘still recording’ file, it’s a completely different workflow.”
The biggest challenge on site, he says, was air conditioning and electricity. The motivation towards
remote workflows lies in the potential cost and manpower savings. “You can imagine how much it costs to despatch that amount of equipment and that number of people from Mexico to Beijing and have them live there for six weeks,” explains Gilbert. Televisa is very technology
orientated and willing to try new things, says Hansen. ‘We did the Olympics in China on a Sienna system back in 2008 and it’s been working very well since then. [Televisa] decided to go for the same system again but wanted to stretch it and do a remote workflow.”
Media integration For the London Olympics, Televisa will use the Sienna MediaVortex workflow. It will link the large Sienna system originally built on site for the Beijing Olympics (which is now permanently installed at Televisa in Mexico City), with a new smaller system, which will be despatched to London with a small crew. A low cost 100Mbps, 200mSec latency connection between the London Games International Broadcast Centre and Sienna broadcast sites on the opposite side of the Atlantic will link twin Sienna infrastructures and power a remote logging and editing workflow. Basing loggers and editors in the existing home broadcast facility instead of building temporary infrastructure in London will lead to significant cost savings. Sienna MediaVortex, a
Editors in Mexico will use the Sienna ImpulsEdit web/cloud-based editor to cut packages, which are then automatically conformed to hi-res in London
The new Televisa system is expected to handle up to 200 hours of content a day
At the Beijing Summer Games in 2008, a massive on-site Sienna system was the second largest visiting infrastructure, second only to NBC’s installation. The Televisa system was all Mac with HD ingest, lots of storage, two playout studios and 250 staff. The amount of media created
over a short period of time was an important lesson learnt from the Beijing Olympics, says Gilbert.
“They were recording 22 channels, 10 hours a day. The amount of data produced was incredible. In Beijing the archive workflow struggled to keep up with the content that was being created.” Beijing was the first Olympics
where Televisa employed a tapeless workflow “so that was also a leap of faith for them. There was also a lot of training involved,” explains Rune Hansen, CTO, Simplemente.
The London-based Sienna rig will provide 24 channels of high definition ingest and playout
realtime WAN acceleration and data transfer server, can propagate proxy assets across the 200mSec latency link as they are recording in London. A concept dubbed ‘conjoined assets’ links records in the twin Sienna media asset management systems to allow collaborative logging of the same asset from both sides of the Atlantic and remote editing using Sienna’s web-based ImpulsEdit, Apple Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere Pro. “We have a MAM at each end linked together in a Sienna Distributed Media Cloud. Rather than using the traditional cloud concept, in broadcast you want a Distributed Media Cloud where you don’t have one central cloud but take all the different
www.tvbeurope.com July 2012
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