March 2014
www.tvbeurope.com
Compared to the old set-up at Quay Street, the new Salford facility affords a significantly better workflow and connectivity
that ‘normal’ office workers can with laptops, mobile phones and online collaboration. So, working with root6, he set about offering the same kind of choice for production staff by devising an infrastructure that allowed any technology to be used in any suite or room. “Why do you have to edit in an edit suite?” asks McNab. “Why can’t you edit in a meeting room if you want to? That drove quite a lot of the infrastructure decisions.” The secret to making this
work in practice was Amulet Hotkey’s zero client, a KVM (keyboard, video and mouse) technology that allows a user to access and use any of the hardware and software in the machine room from a single interface at their desk. Originally adopted by the financial community, it enables users to access multiple systems from a single interface over a network connection without operators and, more importantly, the operating system or application being aware that it is being used from afar.
“It sends two 1920x1200 DVI
displays, computer, audio and mic feeds and the USB signals over a single CAT-6 network cable,” explains McNab. “Pretty much every single computer we have in the facility is connected to this system and that means that, at the press of a button, you can select which physical machine you want to connect to without having to move rooms, or even buildings. We’ve had Avid systems physically located in Salford Quays being operated from Quay Street.” As a result, a craft editing
room within the new facility features 24-inch CPU monitors, an SDI monitor, a rasteriser display, speakers, an audio mixer, a mouse and keyboard but no computer. Freedom indeed. “You cannot do a grading session in the canteen”, says McNab, “but, where it is appropriate, staff can work where they feel the most comfortable and feel the most productive.” Away from the Amulet system, the majority of the traditional broadcast infrastructure is concentrated on the fourth floor of ITV’s new offices, spanning out from the central machine room. Included are networking, audio and video to “pretty much every room on the floor, including the meeting rooms”
plus uncompressed feeds to most of the communal televisions. IPTV encoders are available
for firing pictures around the company network while ITV’s own nationwide 10Gb network and its video circuits
for transfer and transmission can send content further afield. Compared to the old set-up at Quay Street, concludes McNab, the new Salford facility, because it was designed rather than an
TVBEurope 35 The Workflow
organic topology, affords a significantly better workflow and connectivity. With centralised hardware and the ability to route to anywhere, it is a highly adaptable and efficient facility
designed, not just for now but for the future too. “Redesigning the
infrastructure has allowed us to create a really flexible installation that will suit us for years to come,” he says.
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