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Sky Network Television produces a daily 30 minutes news coverage of the sports world. Thanks to Dalet News Suite, they have implemented an en-to-end tapeless workflow.
Incoming satellite feeds are continuously recorded in FIFO loop mode on workstations running Dalet Ingest for Firewire and connected to Miranda DV-Bridge+ (1). Material is pushed to a Network Attached System (NAS) used as production storage and central media repository (2) . Journalists access feeds in DV 25 from their workstations (3) so as to view feeds, make shot selections and prepare their stories. All operations are tracked by the Dalet News Suite database server (4). Selected shots are saved to the Dalet Collaborative Clip-Bin which is available on all authorized workstations (3 and 5). Editors finalize packages using Dalet MediaCutter workstations (5). Packages are automatically moved by Dalet application servers (6) from the production storage (2) to both VectorBox play-out servers (7). Producers use their Dalet News Suite workstation (3) to assign stories, build rundowns and track the show on-air. During a show, any modification in the line-up (8) is echoed in the VectorBox play-list (9) and the teleprompter is dynamically updated (10).
extract from TV Technology Europe July/August 2004
Sport is serious business in New Zealand. “Rugby is the backbone of our Nation,” says Simon Winter, Producer at SKY Network Television. “Look at a map.We are on the most isolated island on the globe. Sport is our ticket to discovering the rest of the planet and it is the biggest stage we have to show the rest of the world what we Kiwis stand for.”
Since its creation, SKY Television has made sports a big part of the winning formula, making it one of the fastest growing pay-TV networks on the planet. Of the first three channels SKY launched in 1990, one was dedicated to sports. Of the fifty-four channels SKY proposes to its subscribers today, six are dedicated to covering the world of sports: SKY Sport 1, 2, and 3 along with The Rugby Channel, ESPN and TAB Trackside. SKY made a bold move in January, 2003, by deciding to launch its own live sports update program. The show would cover every sport, everywhere, everyday. Labelled Sport 365, the daily bulletin would run during prime time — at seven o’clock in the evening. An additional late edition would air on Fridays and Saturdays, covering the day’s game results.
The schedule was aggressive. The decision was made in February to launch the show for the first of September, less than seven months later. “From the start, it was clear that we would go digital, recalls Brian Himsley, Head of Production Services, who was put in charge of coordinating the Sport 365 project. We were convinced that videotape is a dead format and that to go linear would not have been cost effective. It would have required more edit suites and more staff to operate the system; options that our budget did not allow for.”
SKY started looking for a digital news system.“SKY was really looking for a single integrated system that would act both as a news production system and a newsroom computer system.That’s when I introduced them to DaletPlus”, recalls Rick Zattera, Sales and Support Engineer at AMtech. Based out of Sydney, AMtech had been a long-time technology partner of SKY and had recently become a distributor of Dalet Digital Media Systems throughout Australia and News Zealand.
Through its office in Sydney, Dalet organized demonstrations of its system. DaletPlus News Suite rapidly turned out to be the solution that SKY had been looking for. “From ingest, to editing and playout to archive management, DaletPlus did everything we wanted and more”, explains Matt Watson, Head of Broadcast Engineering at SKY. “Better, it was the best bang for the buck that we could get.”
The fact that DaletPlus is a software solution that runs on standard IT servers and workstations appealed to the SKY team in charge of setting up Sport 365. “Using standard IT was a plus for us. Proprietary hardware may be built for TV, but it comes at a premium. The distributed architecture of DaletPlus provided us with the reliability that we needed and that was important,” says Himsley.
DaletPlus News Suite takes advantage of Gigabit Ethernet networking and clientserver computing to provide desktop browsing and editing in native DV 25. All material — from recorded feeds to rundowns and stories — is stored on a central clustered server. At SKY, feed ingest is ensured by four dedicated IBM Intellistation M-Pro workstations that take advantage of Miranda DV Bridges to convert incoming SDI signals to DV. The resulting video files are recorded on a NetApp 960 storage appliance which provides a total storage capacity of 120 hours of DV 25. Edit while recording is available and as soon as a recording starts, material is available for preview and editing. “We can directly browse incoming feeds from our desktops in the newsroom, explains Annie Otway, producer for Sport 365. Journalists do their shot selections of recorded or on-going games while writing their stories. And, we can review both stories and shot-list straight from our desktops.”
Producers use DaletPlus News Suite to build the schedule of their coming show and assign stories. Journalists view on-going or recorded games from their desktop, make shot selections and write their scripts. “This really gives us the ability for fast turnaround, explains Brian Himsley. You can have finished editing the story as a game is over.” Once story and shot-list are approved by their producer, journalists move to one of the two edit suites available so as to finalise their package with the help of an editor. “In the future, we’ll go one step further and allow journalists to directly record VOs from their desktop using lip mikes,” says Matt Watson.
All operations are done from the DaletPlus desktop application which runs on standard Microsoft Windows workstations. So as to make operations easier, users can configure and save their own favourite workspaces. The same principle applies for the views that producers have of rundowns. “I like the timing management view I can have of the rundown, says Simon Winter. It really helps me prepare my show and approve all the different elements that will make up the newscast.”
On-air operations are fully integrated. Finalised clips are dynamically moved from the central storage server to the VectorBox video server used for play-out and stories are loaded on the teleprompter. Any change in the rundown is immediately reflected in the Vector play-list, as well as on the prompter. DaletPlus provides the show time tracking functionality that directors need to keep the show on-track.
Once broadcasted, selected stories are archived on a near-line tape library running IBM Tivoli HSM system. “We use our corporate IT infrastructure to archive material, says Watson. In the future, we’d like to take advantage of the fact that our DaletPlus system can be grown into a full blown asset management system to move our whole facility to a tape-less environment.”
TV Technology Europe – July/August 2004
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