TV3 Barcelona
Nov 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By David Austerberry
The DAM pioneer describes its successful eight-year file-based production project.
Televisió de Catalunya operates the TV3 public TV channel in Barcelona, Catalonia, an autonomous community of Spain. The station airs a mix of news, entertainment, documentaries and sports. Original transmissions used to be on a single analog channel, but the station is now distributed via cable, satellite and IPTV, as well as a new DVB-Tservice. TV3 is trialing an HD/5.1 service, but awaits freed UHF spectrum as analog channels are shut down.
File-based production
Master control at TV3 uses vsn playout automation to control two analog and four digital channels.
The station invested considerable effort in setting up a tapeless production workflow. It was an early adopter of digital asset management (DAM) and purchased one of the first systems that was designed for broadcast applications, the Media360 from Informix (acquired by IBM in 2001).
Much has changed in the world of DAM since those early days, and TV3 has evolved the system using its own software team, Activa Multimedia, to create a system that more closely matches the needs of a multichannel, multiformat digital broadcaster. TV3 has also worked closely with vsn to integrate broadcast automation. The current system uses the Digition DAM, based on Informix Media 360, for news and the program archive, and a vsnmulticom for content movement and playout of all channels.
During the transition to a file-based workflow, TV3's goals were to create a complete solution that was simple and intuitive to use, as well as improve the efficiency and speed of production.
News
The introduction of asset management at TV3 allows the current affairs department to pick up stories from the newsroom.
TV3 has a large newsroom that provides local and international news as well as current affairs programming. It features 400 PCs complete with editing facilities. Digition automates the ingest of agency feeds using a set of rules that automatically distributes stories to designated folders at specific times.
Journalists use Avid iNEWS NCRS to write scripts with desktop editing based on the SGO News, an editor application from Soluciones Gráficas por Ordenador, which has been adapted to local requirements. This desktop editor supports simple edits, voice-overs and basic titling, as well as more sophisticated effects including slo-motion and image freeze. The station uses Apple Final Cut for craft editing of news items.
General program content is shot on DVCPRO50 and edited native on Avid Media Composer. TV3 also uses Adobe Premier Pro for post-production effects and has integrated the application with Digition.
Archive
The station has a large program archive, with 200,000 hours of material recorded on DVCPRO tape as well 1in, Beta SP and Digital Betacam. There is a program in place to ingest videotapes as files in a task expected to span three to four years. So far, 90,000 hours have been encoded. A separate news archive contains 20,000 hours of reports stored on DVCPRO tapes. DVCPRO50 is used for programs and DVCPRO25 for news.
A disk storage array was built with sufficient capacity to store all of the work in progress. Seven agents in the DAM system purge and manage files on hard drive arrays. The lifetime of news content is two days, and the lifetime of sports content is seven days. After that, the files are purged from the drives. The Digition system runs on an IBM Informix database. The iNEWS NRCS has been integrated with Digition, which enables easy movement of news items to reuse in current affairs programming.
The ingested material is stored on D9940 and LTO-3 format data tapes in a Sun Storagetek SL8500 library fitted with five drives. Each LTO-3 tape has a capacity of 400GB, which holds 30 hours of DVPRO25. Using the LTO-3 tapes, the capacity of the Sun library system is 3PB or 100,000 hours of DVCPRO50. A Front Porch Digital DIVArchive interfaces the disk storage with the tape library. The software allows users to make a partial restore of a file from tape.
The Digition Suite creates an MPEG-1 proxy along with key frames that can be viewed from any networked PC. A Web browser gives an operator access to all the functionalities needed to search and index the broadcast-resolution files stored in the archive.
Project timeline
The move to a file-based newsroom kicked off in 2000 when the station began using Thomson Grass Valley Profile video servers for promotions. The original units were essentially closed systems with video I/O. Back then, the Avid systems were also closed, although much has changed in the intervening years.
As TV3 could not buy the technology it wanted in 2000, staff engineers proposed building an IT-centric video server based on Matrox cards. They wanted to use standard hardware and open software to build a complete production system including ingest, editing, asset management and playout. They also wanted the system to be equally suited to news, sport and general entertainment production.
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