26 TVBEurope The Workflow
One of Polsat’s playout studios
www.tvbeurope.com April 2014
tape library on different tape groups.
Within the archiving solution different levels of cataloguing of archive objects are performed accordingly to the predefined subjects, such as: sports, culture, politics, music, communication disasters, etc. An automatic QC process confirms internal standards and acceptance procedures. The nearline archive is directly
attached to an Interplay MAM online storage solution providing fast access to assets that are in use or used frequently. To offer powerful query functions, metadata fields within Interplay MAM help to identify assets and also help schedule their transfer to the deep archive. This can also be initiated as a ‘direct move to the deep archive’ or as a ‘copy for safety reasons’. The capacity of this storage is roughly 80TB. The browse storage attached to
Interplay MAM contains the browse- /proxy or low- res versions (MPEG-4/ H.264 at 800kbps) of all material (with optional watermarking), that has been registered and created during any ingest. Authorised users can browse the asset across the Polsat network and can generate simple EDL’s. Because of the fact that the resolution as well as the bitrate has a direct impact on the amount of required browse storage, its capacity was designed to be about 60TB (130,000 hours of material at 1Mbps) for the beginning. There are also specified production
areas interconnected by a computer network. The data and material exchange are difficult, because in each of the areas different formats and compression schemes are used. The formats and compressions used within the production areas adapt to the requirements executed by Vantage and Carbon Coder transcoding servers. The core element of the post
production system is an Avid ISIS shared disk array and the Interplay media management platform. All Media Composer editing workstations (NLE) are equipped with Adrenaline and Mojo SDI external accelerators.
Fulfillment Choosing an Avid solution again was not just a question of confidence but also depended on reliability and stability of an existing installation in the news production being used for over five years already. In developing a tapeless production infrastructure, the IT
department had to fulfill all necessary requirements, such as the bidirectional transport of HD signals over the network as well as supporting streams of up to 50Mbps bandwidth HD files. “The project was so special because it has not been software off the shelf — it was created at the facilities and needed a lot of programming and adaptation to support all legacy interfaces and databases”, explains Brodziak. “It was hard work for both sides: the vendor together with the manufacturers as well as for the IT engineers in charge of the project.”
Although the tapeless system has been
in operation since mid 2013, there are still some elements which are not being fully used. The concurrent 300 licenses show the amount of possible users and applications. It is not a question of training more operators, but of understanding and exploiting the new expanded capabilities of the system. The current goal is to optimise the system and to train the users to make best use of it. The currently used workspace storage
provides a total of 2.5PB for about 110,000 programme units which is filled by three parallel ingest paths in 24/7/365 mode (daily 155TB, monthly 465TB and yearly 558TB) as well as by growing files import.
Solving problems In adopting the system, there were some early difficulties with the interoperability between the MAM and PAM systems, caused by the interfaces and the MXF wrappers. In addition, there have been problems with formats, with information about the aspect ratio getting lost after importing material into the archive. While retrieving the material from the archive, it was displayed in the wrong format. The information had been lost at the MPI software component. The Polsat engineers sat together and
proposed a solution, which then was implemented by the programmers from Avid into specific subfolders containing the correct information. Such trouble- shooting can be compared with open- heart surgery where any mistake can cause the death of the system. Sometimes such ‘problems’ can lead to a delay of the final acceptance of the whole package. But in November 2013, with all problems addressed, Polsat’s tapeless infrastructure went into full operation.
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