28 TVBEurope


www.tvbeurope.com August 2013


“With centralised production it becomes possible to design content for the end device”—Nicolas Deal, UEFA


Asset digitisation and archives: looking ahead By Fergal Ringrose


STEVE MACKEY, VP International Sales Spectra Logic, apologised for the last- minute withdrawal of an NBC Sports manager scheduled to present this case study — meaning Mackey presented himself. “Spectra Logic is a maker of large scale archives – that’s about all you need to know!” he said by way of introduction. “This customer had over 150,000 videotapes, across several sites, in a wide range of analogue formats — a situation that many of you have faced or are facing today.” NBC Sports’ floorspace costs


alone were $267,000 a year, spread across three US sites — headquarters at Stamford Connecticut and two off-site facilities in Colorado and New York. On top of storage there were usage costs; the digitisation process saw PAs or (even worse) editors digitising content, and the scenario of edit suites busy capturing rather than editing that content. Tape stock cost per annum was $600,000. VTR maintenance racked up another $200,000 a year. And there were courier costs, involving duplication of


Steve Mackey: “We are all looking for archives to be energy-efficient”


The conference concludes with a chance to catch up and exchange ideas over networking drinks in the David Lean room


tapes and shipping to clients and remote locations. “So, a very large cost base.


What did they want to do? They wanted to make content immediately available to their production teams; they wanted to provide some kind of disaster recover facility; and they needed to reduce costs,” said Mackey.


“They wanted to reduce tape stock costs and VTR maintenance, and they wanted to improve workflows.” NBC Sports chose Avid Interplay and a Spectra Logic T950 robot — which they have expanded and also added the new Spectra T-finity. Mackey then showed a slide displaying


the old analogue library floorspace and, over in the corner, the Spectra Logic LTO tape library occupying just one twentieth of the floor space. “So, all of that very expensive floorspace was freed up for much more practical uses.” The broadcaster realised it


would take many years and many millions of dollars to digitise the entire library onsite, so it engaged an external services company to encode offsite – and thus began its ‘DAM Conveyer Belt’. Library tapes were sorted for importance and seasonal need,


boxed and inventoried, and shipped to the digitising company in 5,000 tape bulk loads. Tapes were checked in at the digitising company and metadata prepped for encoding (or transcribed from handwritten logs). Tapes were mass encoded


to DV50, DNX145 and XDCAM50. If content was needed the same day it was pitched via Aspera to watch- folders for immediate check-in to Interplay. Over 50,000 tapes were encoded with metadata and archived within 18 months.


The success of the project meant that content became immediately available to production teams, with producers releasing their grasp on tapes hidden in desk drawers. There is no more digitising on-site — there are still some field tapes used, but not taking up precious edit suite resource. Operational cost reductions include tape stock of $225k per year and VTR maintenance of $50k per year. “The storage medium you choose has got to have a number of characteristics,” said Mackey. “Clearly, reliability is key. At the outset of your project you’re probably looking at a fundamental objective of preservation. After going through a massive digitalisation project what you want is that your digital assets are guaranteed to be preserved. You want density — ie, to take up as little floor space as possible. You want to be scalable, as you will be adding assets to the archive every year. And increasingly, we are all looking for archives to be energy-efficient.”


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