feature live news and sport
The demands on sports broadcasters have never been greater. From acquisition to delivery, sports production presents unique requirements, calling on broadcasters to accommodate real-time and non-real-time feeds for the creation of everything from on-the-fly reporting, news and highlights, as well as longer pieces with advanced structures, and to deliver this content to an array of outlets. While contending with the challenges of a live production environment, sports broadcasters must create content that meets the extremely high expectations of the viewing public and deliver it to the home or mobile device without delay. Kirk Marple, chief software architect at RadiantGrid, a Wohler Technologies Company, reports.
‘Game-changing’ approach to standards conversion
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peed of delivery without any sacrifice in content quality is of paramount importance to a network or channel’s competitiveness. The industry’s shift toward file-
based operations has eased the burden of fast-turn sports production to some degree. However, even within this domain, broadcasters need new and better solutions that leverage end-to-end file-based workflows to their full potential to bring much greater efficiency gains. These gains come from realising faster processing times for both short- and long-form content, as well as increasing the production team’s creative and editorial flexibility. For those working in the international market, rapid transformation and standards conversion is particularly essential to fast, efficient delivery of content. While it is difficult for any one vendor to satisfy these requirements, workflow automation does so by consolidating all critical activities on a single platform that supports rapid parallel processing of transformational tasks, facilitates concurrent editorial and transformational activities, and enables more efficient management of media itself. Wohler’s RadiantGrid New Media Automation Platform offers these valuable capabilities by performing faster-than-real-time transcoding and audio processing, standards conversion, mixed cadence correction, video optimisation, and
audio loudness conformance in fully file-based workflows.
The automation platform
The industry’s shift toward file-based operations has eased the burden of fast- turn sports production to some degree. However, even within this domain, broadcasters need new and better solutions that leverage end-to-end file-based workflows to their full potential to bring much greater efficiency gains.
Added to the Wohler Technologies product portfolio with the company’s 2012 acquisition of RadiantGrid Technologies, the RadiantGrid New Media Automation Platform enables highly efficient file-based creation and distribution of media, even as it integrates with and augments trafficking, rights management, linear automation, and business process management systems. A media transformation and processing engine with an underlying content
management fabric sits at the heart of the platform, and these technologies combine to yield a powerful solution for today’s sports broadcasters. Engineered to eliminate the increasingly prevalent and inefficient ‘ping-pong’ effect of sending media back and forth from one vendor’s server to another, the RadiantGrid workflow reduces the production resources required for multiplatform production. The new workflow model does so by compressing technology dependencies into a parallel platform architecture, with predetermined workflow policies and/or on-demand workflow actions. RadiantGrid ensures asset quality while enabling various content transformations, and the platform can perform these processes in batch or grid approaches.
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To maintain the quality of downstream media for transcoding and distribution, the platform automates the intensive quality analysis and corrective processes typically associated with upstream correction. Using dynamic analysis, the system determines the appropriate preparation process for ingested media, eliminating the need to predefine the expected format’s frame, field, audio, and ancillary data parameters and automatically assigning the parameters that will generate the best quality output for the user’s requirements. RadiantGrid’s grid-enabled CPU based processing technology is paired with GPU based image processing techniques from Cinnafilm to facilitate faster-than-real-time processing of content without compromising its visual quality. This unique hybrid capability is critical for rapid file-based transcoding with standards conversion of premium sports programming, where getting there late means not getting there at all.
Within the RadiantGrid standards conversion workflows, incoming content hits a watch folder and is sent through a farm for decoding and transcoding across multiple nodes. The source content is intelligently identified and then de-muxed, with gridded jobs taking multiple virtual concurrent reads from different segments of the source video essence. The audio and ancillary data
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