6 TVBEurope News & Analysis


www.tvbeurope.com January 2013


“Split asunder but connected by pipes. It is the way of the future”


From Television Centre to BBC Digital Media Services


George Jarrett talks to Head of BBC Digital Media Services Clive Hodge about its new home and old restoration assets


BBC TELEVISION Centre will be an emotional loss to hundreds of staff, but not for very long because the market has a set of leaner and clearly focused businesses that have to prove themselves quickly. Having been split asunder


from the mother ship, BBC Digital Media Services in South Ruislip, BBC Post production in Charlotte Street W1, and BBC Studios at Elstree will now be distinct commercial units in aggressively competitive markets. Hunting for Clive Hodge,


head of digital media services, required an extra seven Central Line stops. He was at the new site, 18,000sqft previously occupied by BA. Some 33 permanent staff will be supplemented with freelancers as necessary, sometimes as many as 40, ranging from runners to code writers. Eviction date from TV Centre is 31 March. “We have currently got 25,000sqft, but we use it very inefficiently,” Hodge says. “The walls were put in place for large six-machine analogue edit suites, where currently we have restoration workstations. “This is the one opportunity


to iron out the bottlenecks in the workflow. Our main issue is non-proximity of facilities, and in TV Centre we spend a lot of time running up and down between floors,” he adds. “So we are taking the technology to the people, whereas currently we have to take the people to the technology. Efficiency levels will go way up.


“The opportunity here is to


build rooms that are fit for purpose, and we are actually putting more technology and more workstations into this space,” he continues. “Our digital media services cover restoration, digital archiving, and digital media manipulation in all its forms, so we are generally less customer-facing than editing.” The data network will have two one Gig pipes into the site,


one based on Sohonet and one provided by BT. Both will link through to Charlotte Street and to Elstree studios so that media can be moved around, and the pipes will also provide all the business systems. “Split asunder but connected


by pipes. It is the way of the future,” said Hodge. “We have to put in our own IT systems, and we have got a 10-year lease here, which is an investment by the BBC.” Future-proof facilities will include an impressive central machine room, where all the main workstations will be housed. “They will be restoration workstations armed with cleaning, dust busting and many other tools. It is a suite of options that enable us to touch up, remove grain, and digitally restore. “Any workstation in that


central room is routable through KVM switching, rather than each room having a dedicated function,” says Hodge. “The majority of the rooms here will be high-quality monitoring areas and you will simply route into any room whatever particular plug-ins you need to work off.”


Back to original negatives Restoring old shows is one business strand. The other is handling archive material, be it on tape or film, and getting it into the digital domain. This might mean proxy versions for posting on the web, or crunching a range of file formats for preservation in high resolution. Hodge talked first about recent restoration successes. “We have a split screen from


the The Sweeney (1970s), where we have unprocessed and processed frame, and the detail lost to grain (noise) is now visible,” he said. Also restored was The


Persuaders, and two of David Attenborough’s early series Life on Earth and Trials of Life. Coming up are the three series


of the vicious political drama The House of Cards, and hopefully a third Attenborough series Living Planet. “We are talking to BBC


World Wide about other landmark, sophisticated dramas from the 90’s. There is going to be a stream of those coming on the restoration side. What we are holding up is going back to the original camera negatives,” says Hodge. “If you look at the Attenborough series from 40 years ago you would think they were shot last week. “With Super 16 there was an issue regarding HD, particularly over the grain pattern and noise. We challenge that now because modern grain suppression technologies can


make Super 16 look as good as HD. It is less noisy than HD stuff shot on smaller camera formats,” he adds. “The other, quaint one is Dr Who. We just finished four episodes — the only four that were ever shot entirely on film (16mm). The studio cameramen were on strike and the BBC decided to shoot the whole four episodes on film rather than just the inserts.” The key point again was that the BBC still held the original negatives. Hodge explains more about the other business strands. “Part of our job is to work with people and recommend what is right for them in terms of file formats. The BBC has a very clear view of what it wants internally, but


when you engage with a smaller archive, what they will look for is a recommendation,” he says. “These are often institutions with specialist material that’s not for broadcast. “Cambridge University was digitising its film material. It needed to share this content with collaborators across the world and rather than muck about with film it wanted everything in a file format,” adds Hodge. “We are not just talking about the pure essence format: every use has to be wrapped in a different set of metadata and that is probably the greatest growth area at the moment. “It is all about taking the


Restoration success: Screen grabs from the The Sweeney (1970s), showing unprocessed and processed , Detail lost to grain (noise) is now visible between the HD version (above) and the SD version (below)


raw essence, transcoding it to the appropriate essence format for onward distribution, but then combining it with whatever metadata is available. It may mean creating that metadata wrapper for people to import into their particular DAM system, mount on a particular VoD platform, or indeed just preserve.


VTRs and KVMs Much of the TV Centre technology will travel on, specifically, one Scanity film scanner, one Spirit telecine, a lot of the data manipulation kit and plug-ins, Dolby grading monitors, tons of peripheral kit, a lot of workstations, a lot of VTR machines, a Pro Tools system and a Nucoda Film Master system, around which the restoration operation is built


“The investment is the KVM


infrastructure. We will have a video layer, but mainly we will be using the data structure,” says Hodge. “There is still a vast amount of tape and film out there, and that it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain old VTRs. “We can take all formats


and produce excellent results. The scanner is hi-speed — you are scanning 16mm for HD virtually in realtime. We get high resolution DPX data. We clean the film first, and we have Kodak infrared dirt detection on the scanner too. It also provides a matte, which you can take forward to the restoration workstations.”


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