DAVID Systems’ Video File Transfer system
May 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Ingo Hahn
The German public broadcaster group ARD bases file transfers on MXF standards.
Looking back on the practical experiences from the first few months of regular operation, the project focus has shifted toward workflow optimization.
Initial practical experiences
Officially, regular operation of the VFT system started in September 2007. Many ARD stations, however, had already been using the system to exchange items and shows for many months. Today, the system has established itself as a widely used method for sending items to the ARD broadcast center. Feature-length items are also increasingly being sent via file transfer.
In the first nine months of 2007, more than 15,000 items were exchanged via VFT. This is a strong sign of user acceptance and demonstrates the system's reliability. By comparison, approximately 25,000 items were transferred via the conventional cable system during the same period. For the medium term, the PTKO expects that as the new features provided by he system become more widely known, another 10,000 to 15,000 items will be transferred via VFT rather than cable, i.e., the majority of items will be transferred as digital files.
The new system's flexibility has proven to be particularly advantageous in the course of various system migration projects. An important aspect in the conception of the VFT system was that it should not be limited to the few broadcast stations that were already based on tapeless processes at the time.
Future prospects
At ARD, the VFT system represents a major step toward fully tapeless, cross-location workflows. For stations and studios not yet equipped with nonlinear systems, VFT is a strong reason to embrace this branch of content production. Nonlinear systems will further be encouraged by the increased MXF support that ARD has demanded from production and playout system manufacturers.
Should file-based content sharing at ARD increase over the coming years as predicted by the PTKO, there will need to be ongoing investment in the technological infrastructure. Most importantly, this applies to the planned extension of the ARD HYBNET. As well as the transmission capacities needing to be extended, optimized protocols and packet sizes will need to be introduced. IRT is predicting that once the extensions and upgrades that have been planned in the short term are instated, transfer rates of up to 200Mb/s will be achieved. The highest transfer rates will be facilitated via the new UDP protocol, which is fully compatible with the replication network. The replication systems themselves will also soon need to be upgraded to provide clustering capabilities, as data volumes are rapidly increasing and availability bottlenecks are looming.
The individual broadcast stations should now focus on integrating the new functionalities into their workflows and take advantage of their potential for automation. With comprehensive VFT system integration across ARD, both the parent network and the many individual stations will benefit significantly from the cost and time reductions in the field of content exchanging.
Ingo Hahn is product management director at DAVID Systems.
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