July 2014 www.tvbeurope.com in association with


TVBEurope 15


Avid has shown us today, but how many production people get exposed to this? Almost nobody. So consequently they have no concept or understanding about what this is all about. More senior people do, but the grass roots level don’t. They continue to think in ways they’ve always thought – that is, in a linear fashion. So they’re not getting the benefi ts out of fi le-based working that they might otherwise get, because the tape has been replaced by a fi le, but they’re using workfl ows that are still based in a tape world.” Suker added that in most organisations there was no longer the wealth of experience and the engineering community that the industry once had. In the face of change, without the support of an expert knowledgebase, production teams stick with what they know, even as what they know becomes less and less effective.


and who controls its language and parameters.


ITV Studios’ head of


production innovation, Martyn Suker, posed the question: “Why doesn’t metadata work at the moment? It’s great seeing the kinds of new workfl ows


Metadata issues Steve Bennedik, head of technology at Sky News, said that metadata was an issue for his organisation as well. “For us, the best benefi t would be if metadata was entered at the fi rst point of ingest, and then it fl owed seamlessly through into archive. But that’s quite diffi cult to pull off. It’s important. You’ve got to know the source. Can it be played out to Australia or to America? Can it go out to this new product that


you’re launching? It’s becoming increasingly important to get it right. And it’s taking up a lot of people’s time.”


“The problem is magnifi ed when you digitise and archive,” replied Mark Wilson-Dunn, VP sales and marketing at BT Media and Broadcast, “We did a big archive project with 30,000 hours of content that went back to silent movies. You were actually looking at metadata which was bad, good, indifferent, or didn’t exist and trying to get them to a common standard. Then when you’re trying to sell into an ecosystem to remonetise the content, are the people you’re selling into interpreting that metadata in the same standards and the same


formats? I think you’re absolutely right. One of our biggest learning lessons was metadata.” It was


“When it starts


recognised that the kind of metadata that you would employ in production might be quite different from the metadata that would be required for an archive, and that the real trick of metadata was fi nding a common set of standards that also had fl exibility to incorporate a variety of genres and media types.


Alla Salehian’s company TIMA provides outsourced news reporting and regularly


impacting your budget, that’s when the change happens” Alla Salehian, TIMA


deals with a host of news organisations and freelancers around the world. He wondered how practical it would be to get many different users all on the same page when entering metadata – if you could get them to enter it at all. “If you’re


ITV’s Martyn Suker: “It does take a long time to change, unless there is an immediate catalyst for it”


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