August 2014
www.tvbeurope.com
“We have the most advanced workflow in the BBC” — Mervyn Middleby, BBC NI
Sounding out Loudness The morning sessions concluded with a panel discussion on the challenges of Loudness compliance, moderated by MC Patel of Emotion Systems. Also on the panel were Craig Russill- Roy of Adstream and Simon Leppington of Ericsson. Adstream prepares commercials to be sent out to broadcasters worldwide. The often elusive nature of file delivery, and the global challenge of it, was underlined by Russill-Roy’s description of
fixing non-compliant files created a thorny conundrum: “It was easier to fix a file than to reject it and send it back. But if they’re aware you’re going to fix it for them, it encourages bad practice.” Leppington agreed that education was key, but the company decided to bring in automated QC software, provided by Emotion Systems, which allowed for faster- than-realtime correction in large volume, something that would have been impossible via human QC.
“We would probably start with services in the cloud rather than storage”
Andy Beale, BT Sport
Adstream’s growth: “I managed to pay four people’s mortgages from people not being able to fix a file.”
Russill-Roy lamented the global audio community’s lost opportunity to create a worldwide standard for Loudness. Instead, audio file delivery differs from territory to territory. “We have a lot of people creating content now, hoping they can send the one file absolutely everywhere. And in reality, they can’t.”
Simon Leppington, looking back at his experience at Technicolor (now Ericsson Broadcast Services), found that
High-end workflows Simon Robinson, chief scientist and co-founder of The Foundry, kicked off the afternoon sessions with a case study on the changing nature of broadcast.
As a software vendor, The Foundry primarily deals with content creation, particularly in VFX for the film market. Robinson explained how VFX has a long history of file-based workflow. “In film, the rise of digital acquisition over the last few years means as a software vendor we primarily think about end-to-end production workflows which are entirely
TVBEurope 17 IT Broadcast Workflow 2014
file-based, not touching tape and not touching film anywhere in the process.” Best known for its
compositing software NUKE, The Foundry developed the system for assembling clips and to handle complexity involved in high-end film work. “NUKE is there to take assets of various forms — whether from 3D, live action or animation — and bring them all together to create a 2D file sequence. It’s there to aggregate assets to create a clip,” he explained.
Among its impressive portfolio in film and TV work, NUKE has been used on Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity and HBO’s Game of Thrones. On Gravity, NUKE dealt with a vast amount of complexity and extremely large compute requirements. For Game of Thrones, Robinson said: “As far as workflows and toolsets go and techniques employed to create the visuals, it’s very similar to high-end film. The quality threshold has gone way up.”
Strong links
TMD chairman Tony Taylor introduced a case study by Discovery Communications. The companies have worked together since 2006 and TMD put the first tape management system into Discovery’s Silver Spring, Maryland facility. Jim McGrath, senior VP, global media engineering, Discovery Communications, set the scene by detailing the company’s global reach. It boasts 2.5 billion cumulative subscribers, operates in 224
Craig Russill-Roy of Adstream, Simon Leppington of Ericsson and MC Patel from Emotion Systems talk Loudness
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