14 TVBEurope News & Analysis M6 finds new Matrix By Fergal Ringrose
COMMERCIAL FRENCH national broadcaster M6 Group has chosen MatrixStore from Object Matrix to be an integral part of its file-based workflows, as part of a renewal of internal infrastructure for its post production entities, C•Productions and Studio 89. The RTL Group-Bertelsmann broadcaster was attracted to an Object Matrix solution based on the need to implement a secure and performant storage platform. “As part of the overall
reorganisation of our post production units, we wanted to
We can go to whatever the industry needs. There is nothing that is hard-wired into that,” Willis says. Asked about a future
standardisation effort, he comments: “We do that when we have a critical mass of companies
update our storage platform and processes. M6 previously faced problems managing the growing volume of files, laboriously backing up content to tape or performing manual backups to unsecure hard drives,” said Mathias Béjanin, director Engineering and Maintenance, M6. “Taking the advice of our systems integrator, we modestly increased our Avid Unity ISIS production storage and focused on implementing a storage tier that could alleviate the burden on the production storage by providing a secure parking repository.”
on board, because in this world most of the standards are either de facto ones driven by the companies themselves, or they go through the standards process because there is an industry group behind them.” Willis has a full-time
programmer who is creating the Object Matrix provides
native integrations with incumbent MAM or PAM technology such as the popular InterConnect plugin for Avid Interplay. “The InterConnect application is a simple drag/drop operation that can archive or restore media without stopping the production system. The initial storage capacity of the MatrixStore cluster is 40TB providing protection for around 1,500 hours of XDCAM HD footage,” said Fernando Carvalho, CTO of Paris systems integrator Eliote. www.object-matrix.com
preliminary codec, and the project team has been working with video content supplied by Smoke & Mirrors so test results can be shown at the CVMP (Conference for Visual Media Production) in December (Vue Cinema).
We have lift off:Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) used Blackmagic Design’s ATEM 2 M/E Production Switcher and ATEM 2 M/E Broadcast Panel with the recent global broadcast of SpaceX’s mission to the International Space Station (ISS). SpaceX also used Blackmagic Design’s Smart Videohub and Universal Videohub routers, SmartView Duo, SmartView HD, ATEM Camera Converters and numerous Mini Converter HDMI to SDIs in their broadcast control room. As part of the recent mission, SpaceX created an infrastructure to broadcast live feeds of the launch, docking and reentry. These feeds were shown on SpaceX’s website and through live feeds to some of the world’s largest news sources. — Melanie Dayasena-Lowe www.blackmagicdesign.com
Asked to predict the death date
for pixels, Willis says: “That’s tempting fate. First of all, we need to do further work on some of the high level operations that you can do with these images. What we have at the moment is a codec. The industry needs to
manipulate images, and we need to develop the technology that we can move on to them for doing that manipulation. And that’s when they can become seriously interested across the whole spectrum of things that the technology can address.”