44 TVBEurope The Workflow
An IBM IT platform and a JORDI robot tackled the archive problem at WDR. David Stewart investigates
WDR MEDIAGROUP (WDRmg), the commercial subsidiary of WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk, West German Broadcasting Company), was commissioned by the German public broadcaster to convert its entire videotape archive into a digital, file-based archive. In total, around one million videotapes from the WDR archives needed to be digitised. Supported by its partners, WDRmg implemented an innovative solution based on industrial robot technology from JORDI AG Communication and a modular IT platform from IBM. It allows WDRmg to digitise around 40,000 hours of content a year, from thousands of tapes, with continuous operation and minimal manual intervention, making the WDR archive quickly and easily available to editors to enhance its programming or extend its services to its viewers. The innovative industrial robot system ADAM (Automated Digital Archive Migration) was deployed to assist in the conversion, as it can remain in constant use, day in, day out, to convert approximately 40,000 hours of programming a year. (In comparison, one person could only manage around 1,000 hours.) ADAM is based on a standard industrial robot — similar to those used in car manufacturing — and it is highly efficient and powerful. It weighs 250kg and operates in a custom-built room, surrounded by walls of compartments holding up to 762 video cassettes. The cassettes are fed into the system from an adjacent room
via a rotating carousel. The robot then selects them, using barcode technology, and slots them systematically into temporary storage racks. The system handles the conversion of all tapes in the Sony Betacam family of formats into IT-compatible formats. ADAM can operate
continuously for up to three days, 24/7, without requiring any tapes to be exchanged. For full, continuous operation of the system, only three full-time employees are needed. A link to the WDR archive
database enables the digitisation process to be tracked. This begins with the assignment, which is done based on archive number and ends with the final status report to the archive database, providing a digital counterpart to the cassette with the same archive number. The ADAM system was
developed and produced by JORDI AG Communication on behalf of WDRmg specifically for the digitisation of the WDR archives. Though a previous prototype had been installed elsewhere, the production version at WDRmg was vastly superior, with many more advanced features.
Digital archive One such feature is the direct connection to the WDR archives. ADAM is producing a large digital media archive, which would be useless unless properly managed and easy to access. The digital data generated from the videotape files is managed by IBM Archive and Essence Manager (AREMA).
AREMA has been designed to help media organisations transform from tape- to file- based production and from TV- to cross-platform delivery and business models, helping them to manage their large digital archives, and the associated flow of materials. It manages, transfers, tracks and transcodes the digital media files, and automates many of the processes once associated with physical analogue files. AREMA also generates a frame-accurate MPEG-4 proxy with eight audio tracks. Only small to mid-range
hardware was required for the IT infrastructure supporting ADAM, including IBM BladeCenter Bladeservers, IBM
SAN switches, DS3400 disk storage system and IBM System Storage TS3500 Tape Library with 4 x TS1140 tape drives to digitise the content on IBM ‘Jaguar’ tapes. Finally a central hosting service at the ARD datacenter ‘IVZ’, which supports most of the German public broadcasters, will store the digital tapes in a distributed archived system, based on the IBM TS3500 tape library, for long-term archiving and easy access to the content. The combination of ADAM and AREMA has made the downstream systems in WDR much more flexible, enabling editors to access the video clips directly, quickly and easily, and
enabling WDR to re-use its archive content more efficiently. The system, since its launch, has been very successful. Around 37,000 hours of programming from around 80,000 videotapes were digitised in the first year of production alone. Having the archive available online has allowed WDR to update and optimise its production workflows. The digitally stored content can now be accessed directly by the editors from the archive on their usual computer workstations, removing the need to make and lend copies, and making it faster to present archive material to the viewer, or re-use archive material to produce or enhance other programmes.
The industrial robot can convert about 40,000 hours of programming a year
www.tvbeurope.com September 2012
Around 37,000 hours of programming from 80,000 videotapes were digitised in the first year
ADAM lends a helping hand
Photo credit: WDR
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