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Removable Media For HD Workflows
Last year, Marquis Broadcast and Ikegami demonstrated
the world's first multi-vendor HD workflow at the Inter BEE Show in Japan.
Granby Patrick, CEO, Marquis Broadcast, explains how the development was
instigated by the Japanese market, and looks at the benefits of using digital
removable media to achieve practical, streamlined capture to playout HD
workflows.
Removable Media and
HD
As systems engineers tool
up to deal with HD, many parts of the processing chain need to be swapped out
or upgraded. This is a perfect opportunity to embrace the ingest of material
from removable media and ensure that maximum benefits are obtained.
Marquis enjoys a strong relationship with Omneon who
OEMs Marquis' Medway media highway software as their conform tool. Last year,
following interest from Japanese broadcasters, Ikegami asked Omneon to
commission Marquis, with the support of Avid, to develop an extension to Medway
to support DNxHD. Marquis had already worked with Ikegami on a transfer tool to
enable media from the FieldPaks used by Ikegami's disk-based camera to be made
available in a file-based environment to asset management and production and
editing systems in a user friendly presentation. While being capable of moving
files, existing tools designed for this purpose had created a number of issues.
Medway had the advantage of offering a smoother solution and also provided
access to a wider range of servers. With help from Avid, Omneon, Ikegami and
Marquis were able to work together to significantly enhance existing offerings
by adding HD support. The companies have been working together for some months
and a number of demonstrations have taken place both in Europe and Asia,
including a multi-vendor capture to playout HD workflow at last year's Inter
BEE.
Japanese broadcasters have
been transmitting HD material longer than any other country, and as they
prepare to roll out HD onto their mainstream networks, they have a strong
desire to eliminate the use of tape at the same time. The demonstration at
Inter BEE used Medway to move the media between the Ikegami FieldPak, the Avid
MediaComposer connected to an ISIS workgroup system, and an Omneon video
server. Using Medway, clips can be moved between these three systems simply by
dragging and dropping. The user doesn't need to worry about the complexities of
the transfers that are occurring in the background despite the use of different
networks, network authentication, different directory structures and file
wrappers. The diagram below depicts the module for Medway's retrieval and
integration of media from removable storage devices.
The workflow reinforces the opportunities created for
systems engineers to choose best of breed products from different manufacturers
and put them together in a seamless integrated workflow.
Digital Removable Media
The story so far Digital removable media offers many
benefits when there is a need to transport recorded media, ie audio and video,
to a separate destination. Of course, the advantages of digital media compared
with video tape are well documented. They include: random access to media,
rapid and multiple access to the same media, access to proxy copies, improved
metadata, the possibility of automated bulk transfer, reduced storage volume,
higher reliability and easier backup. However, some of these benefits may not
be achieved easily - perhaps because of the limitations of the existing
infrastructure. Also, new issues may be raised by removable media that offset
the advantages, such as: high cost of media, incompatibility of media file
types, inconsistency between the different media formats, integration between
additional metadata and asset management systems, and the complexity of
handling large numbers of rushes.
There are currently four major digital removable media formats:
Sony XDCam, Panasonic P2, Ikegami FieldPaks and GVG Infinity Rev Pro disks.
There are also a number of smaller manufacturers offering disk-based field
recording technologies such as Firestore. A new type of tool is needed to
handle this media and the files that they create.
Inevitably, a lot of the material shot is of little or no value
for a variety of reasons - bad takes, long runs waiting for events, door
stepping etc - which means that the nuggets of useful material have to be
extracted from all of this waste footage. You probably don't want to add clips
from the camera to the main enterprise asset management system until they have
been through some degree of triage and possibly formatting, otherwise you risk
clogging the asset management system with large amounts of low value clips. You
may also want to concatenate related clips into a single 'asset' so that they
can be logged, tagged and tracked as a single item.
The XDCam and RevPro formats offer the advantage of
low media cost, but at the penalty of slower access and transfer speeds.
FieldPaks and the other disk-based systems offer the benefits of high storage
capacities and high access and transfer speeds. The RevPro and the FieldPak are
essentially based on industry standard technologies, therefore profiting from
the ever increasing capacities and data transfer rates of data storage, whereas
the XDCam and the P2 are more proprietary and therefore need more intensive
continuous development to enjoy the benefits of increasing capacity. Each
technology has different advantages and is appropriate for different
applications. This increases the problem for the systems engineers to design
systems that can cope equally well and efficiently with all formats.
Systems that are designed to
create edit-ready field formats (P2 and FieldPaks) record separate audio, video
and reference files, making simple file copying very complicated, essentially
requiring an editing workstation to manage the clips. These systems also tend
to use machine-generated file names with human readable names and additional
metadata in the references.
P2
and Ikegami FieldPaks have tools that allow material to be moved off the high
value cards onto lower cost generic disk storage, allowing the cameraman more
autonomy in the field without carrying a king's ransom in memory cards. All
formats offer the potential for the operations manager to keep a much closer
track on the physical assets that he is putting out in the field with the
camera crews.
Metadata
Handling
Some systems promote
the idea of preparing the removable media with identification of the material
being recorded. This means adding metadata to the media before the shoot. Any
metadata gathered before, during or after the recording will help to manage the
media created. Most cameras have a facility to tag or mark clips to identify
the good takes from the bad ones. Gathering the maximum amount of metadata in
the field has advantages. For a start, it is the people in the field who will
have the maximum amount of information available. It also eliminates the delay
of inserting an additional step when the material is ingested. However, in the
real world, the amount of metadata captured with the material in the field will
probably remain minimal. Therefore the ingest process needs to make it as easy
as possible to gather the maximum amount of information at the moment of ingest
into the production system, and refuse to ingest material that does not have a
basic minimum of metadata attached. Any process which is difficult to use will
not get used at all in the heat of the moment of a fast moving production. The
metadata required will vary between different facilities depending on house
standards, what type of material is being handled etc. Marquis' Medway is
designed to be very rich in the metadata it captures and handles, but also
highly configurable, so that each system's requirements can be adopted without
the need to change the base product in any way.
Often an archive department will spend time logging material
after the main production is complete. It is very important that this logging
activity is moved as far upstream as can be achieved. This will allow maximum
benefit to be derived from the logging process. If material is logged for
archive just before it is archived, it is quite possible that that material
will never be seen again. However, if the same logging work is done as soon as
the material enters the production system, all of the production staff can
benefit from easier access and identification of the material, making all their
work that much easier.
Automated Ingest
As soon as recorded media returns from a shoot, it should be
automatically ingested into the main production system so that it is accessible
to the maximum number of people as quickly as possible. A news editor can view
rushes to get an idea of a story before the journalist puts his package
together. Two journalists can work on two angles or versions of the same story
from the same rushes. A video editor can start work on the edit while the
journalist starts on the voiceover. However, as above, all of this is useless
if the automated ingest does not add at least a basic level of metadata.
Proxy Editing
Many camera systems now produce
their own low resolution video proxy files which are supposed to make desktop
editing easier. However, most of the desktop browse editing systems will not
work unless they have created, indexed and data-based the material themselves.
Therefore using proxies generated by the camera system is difficult. Proxies
allow material to be sent back to the production centre at speed over commodity
internet connections so that a shot selection can be made. Only the selected
full resolution material needs to be moved, possibly over the same connection.
This could make a dramatic saving in contribution costs. Of course, the use of
proxies and the potential savings in transmission costs for remote
contributions become more significant when handling HD material with its
significantly larger file sizes.
Medway for Removable Media
Marquis has been working on a solution to the above issues for
some time. Medway offers a very easy to use method of managing the movement of
media, and capturing, formatting and registering metadata into major production
systems in a streamlined and easy to use way. A new version of Medway is in
development that will enable broadcasters to achieve more benefits from digital
removable media and avoid many of the pitfalls.
Medway provides a simple to use interface to view clips
available from removable media, edit the metadata and transfer clips into the
production system with the correct file formatting and registration of the
available and edited metadata. It offers the operations team the most efficient
way of delivering new material as fast, securely and as efficiently as possible
to the production team. As systems engineers start to plan their HD migration,
a perfect opportunity exists to embrace these new technologies and ensure
maximum benefits are derived from the whole capture to playout process.
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