Omneon will provide its MediaDeck media servers, MediaGrid active storage systems and ProCast CDN transport engines to NBC during the network’s coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics from Beijing, China, Aug. 8-24.
The workflow begins with 20 MediaDeck servers located in China that will be used to digitize and ingest SD and HD feeds. Each MediaDeck contains both high-res and low-res codecs to simultaneously create both full-res IMX or XDCAM HD files and low-res proxy files of all recordings. The resulting files will be actively transferred, while still being recorded, to the MediaGrid.
Then, using the ProCast CDN, the proxies will be transferred more than 6,000mi from the MediaGrid in Beijing to a second MediaGrid in the United States, where, using BlueOrder’s MediaArchive digital asset management (DAM) solution, producers can search, browse, view and edit the files. The EDLs created using the proxy files then can be used to request only the desired SD and HD high-res footage over the network for final production editing.
This intelligent use of proxy-based EDLs ensures that only the actual high-res footage needed for each new content package is transferred from Beijing to the United States, saving network bandwidth and improving the efficiency of the workflow.
The key to the workflow is the Omneon ProCast CDN, a file transport engine with performance that is unaffected by distance, enabling it to accomplish transfers at stunning speeds even when great distances are involved. File transfer speeds achieved with ProCast CDN can be significantly greater than FTP transfers, especially over long distances where FTP performance typically deteriorates. For example, a one-hour DV25 file sent from Beijing to the United States on a 400Mb/s connection would take 30 hours via FTP, but takes only three minutes with ProCast CDN.
For more information, visit http://www.omneon.com/.