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Engineering Excellence Awards

Mar 1, 2008 12:00 PM

RUNNER-UP:
Category

New studio technology — network

Submitted by

Network Electronics

Pan Am Games

Following five years of preparation, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, hosted its biggest sporting event in July 2007. The XV Pan American Games kicked off in the city's new Maracana Stadium. A continental version of the global Olympic Games, the competition has been held every four years since 1951. Athletes compete in 34 sports spanning 16 days. In all, 5648 contestants from 42 American nations competed in front of a potential 1 billion global viewers, with live coverage originating from 16 different locations. An elaborate network was designed to support live simultaneous feeds from 10 geographically dispersed events. Some events required multiple feeds.

Network Electronics began working with its Brazilian distributor, Libor, in August 2006 to design and supply a system based on the company's Flashlink fiber-optic transport platform to accommodate situations requiring a mix of HD and SD gear and long-haul transmission. The International Broadcast Center (IBC) provided a signal for major broadcasters around the world.

WINNER:
Globo's Studios

Submitted by

TV GLOBO

Globo's Studios

Winner of new studio technology — HD

The Brazilian network TV GLOBO is known for its production of telenovelas, which dominate primetime viewing. Telenovela is a form of melodramatic serialized fiction produced and broadcast six days a week (a yearly average of 200 episodes each) that attract a broad audience and command the highest advertising rates. GLOBO does not only produce for the local market but also exports its telenovelas worldwide.

With a huge production complex in Rio de Janeiro (CGP), GLOBO has heavily invested in quality and technology, the most important pillars to support its success.

In January 2007, GLOBO upgraded its old SDI studios using a brand new technology based on SMPTE-424/425M, a standard that expands upon SMPTE 259M (143/270/360Mb/s) and SMPTE 292M (1.485Gb/s) providing bit rates of 2.970Gb/s (3G). These bit rates allow the broadcast of 1080/60p 4:2:2 and 1080/60i 4:4:4 formats.

The project's main purpose was to prepare the infrastructure for 3G technology, so the network invested in cables, patches, routing switchers and modules that were already compliant with SMPTE-424M. In the future, the network will continue to upgrade equipment. In the meantime, GLOBO produces both in SDI (SMPTE 259M) and HD-SDI (SMPTE 292M).

Each studio is comprised of four control rooms (technical, video and lighting, production and audio) with five new cameras; four fiber-optic external lines; tape and tapeless recording for postproduction; a multiviewer, providing operational flexibility to the monitor walls; UMD and tally system; new microphones; and a new wireless communication system that offers mobility and additional network managing (SNMP), which supports the whole system. Many design changes were also introduced in the four technical areas, which were fully dismantled and rebuilt.

In August 2007, GLOBO TV started producing the first HDTV telenovela in the new studio.

RUNNER-UP:
Category

New studio technology — HD

Submitted by

Front Porch Digital

KYW-TV

On April 2, 2007, Philadelphia's KYW-TV (CBS 3) broadcast its 11 o'clock news from the station's new 120,000sq-ft facility. It was one of the nation's first all-HD TV stations built from the ground up, and was designed and constructed in less than 10 months.

The facility is also home to WPSG-TV, a CW station. KYW produces five-and-a-half hours of news per day in addition to sports specials and charity fund-raisers. When the station's lease was up, the engineering team saw an opportunity to build an efficient, scalable facility that would also be a pleasant place to work. The team knew this would require a different model for storage and workflow than the SD model, which would soon be overwhelmed by the density of information HD carries.

Key to the success is the digital workflow anchored by Front Porch Digital's DIVArchive content storage management system, which works with Thomson Grass Valley's Aurora editing suite and a Spectra Logic LTO3 library.

WINNER:
National Geographic

Submitted by

SGI

National Geographic

Winner of new studio technology — nonbroadcast

National Geographic Digital Motion, the archive and stock footage licensing agent for all National Geographic Television film and video, wanted to transform its analog video archive and licensing business into a streamlined digital workflow. It has more than a century's worth of moving images from around the world, and new footage, much in HD, arrives all the time. The company's key requirement was the ability to store content and deliver content to the Web in uncompressed formats to maintain the highest possible quality.

National Geographic designed the system and selected the various components. For storage, it contacted OSSI, an SGI channel partner, which suggested SGI InfiniteStorage as the major storage and file-sharing component. The SGI InfiniteStorage CXFS shared filesystem and SGI InfiniteStorage arrays optimize delivery of rich-media content and seamlessly support a variety of complex transactions.

One of the biggest challenges was the amount of data that would be brought into the system. When National Geographic encodes video, three different file formats are created at the same time: uncompressed, MPEG-2 and MPEG-1. The uncompressed data alone is about 100GB per hour.

National Geographic encodes its tapes into an asset management system backed with 34TB shared over two SGI InfiniteStorage TP9300 systems and a later-added additional 35TB of storage on a SGI InfiniteStorage 4000 system. The SGI storage is where operators catalog the clips with keywords and push them out to an external Web site to allow customers to preview the content and determine their purchases. Once licensed, that content is played out via the SGI SAN and made available in multiple formats, including NTSC, PAL and DVD as before, and now files over FTP. National Geographic will soon be able to encode clips in HD and offer customers all high-definition formats.