In Broadcast - May 2012 - 70

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 8 - MAY 2012

InMEDIA

New Developments In Asset Management
By Charlie Dunn, Senior Vice President of Products, Grass Valley
Charlie Dunn

Grass Valley has a long and important place in the history and development of asset management…
The need for asset management springs from the use of servers and ﬁle-based storage, and the history of broadcast servers can be traced back to the Grass Valley Proﬁle server. The Proﬁle transformed broadcast operations, and particularly playout, by putting content about to be used onto disk. This content became instantly and randomly available, whereas content on tape needed a human or robot to load and time to spool up. The automation system needed another layer of applications to track what content was still on tape, what had been transferred to a Proﬁle (and where), and what content would be needed on Proﬁle in the near future and therefore scheduled 70 for transfer. It also needed to allocate resources in advance and look ahead to see which content could safely be deleted from the Proﬁle. This was, and remains, the essence of asset management: knowing what content you have available, and ensuring it is in the right form, at the right place, at the right time. The difference today is that server capacities have hugely increased. The ultimate goal for any broadcast architecture is to use this volume of storage around a complex network to make all content transparently available to every qualiﬁed user. There are a couple of issues which arise from that statement, which deﬁne the modern asset management system. Firstly, huge amounts of storage are useless, unless you can drive that content through workﬂows, either to produce efﬁciencies of scale or to raise new sources of revenue. That means creating an agile environment in which new workﬂows can be added quickly as commercial or operational requirements demand them. Secondly, providing access to users is no longer simply a matter of password protecting a workstation. Different users require access to different content at different times, but perhaps most importantly they need to access it using different tools. For example, a broadcaster may have commissioned a drama series, and now needs to make a set of promos. You could give an editor access to the programmes using an asset management terminal, and arrange for their transfer from the storage network into the edit system. Then the editor could sit in an expensive edit suite reviewing all the content, identifying likely clips and moving them into edit bins, then ﬁnally doing the work. A much more efﬁcient use of time though is for the commissioning executive and presentation producer to agree on the ‘high spots’ of the drama which are likely to make for an exciting promo. Then use a simple desktop tool, working on a proxy to minimise the load on the high-resolution server network to clip up those excerpts. The clips could then be automatically loaded into a bin in the craft editor, so all time in that expensive suite is spent cutting not viewing. Today, the asset management system has the potential to be the controlling force behind the workﬂows, making them faster, more cost-effective, and more powerful. But to achieve that it has to be an integral part of not just the content storage, but of the applications which access that content. As well as playout that means integration into editing, graphics, transcoding and repurposing, quality control and more. The broadcast industry solution is based on a technique from the IT industry called the service oriented architecture (SOA). The challenge with allowing content to be managed across and from within many different applications, from a number of vendors, is that you end up with a rapidly expanding number of interfaces, for both content and metadata, to allow each device to talk to each other. An SOA is based on a common exchange bus, with a simple plugin – known as an adaptor – for each device to talk to the network. If, for example, the edit software is upgraded, there is no need to change anything at all except the adaptor, which is typically a small piece of XML code which can be modiﬁed quickly and at very low cost. For an SOA to be successful it has to be hosted on a common, pervasive, stable, and secure platform. The server storage network is the perfect host because every broadcast application needs access to the content, and talks to the server network. That is why Grass Valley’s STRATUS SOA delivers power to systems architects, because it is hosted within a powerful storage network system, the Grass Valley K2 server platform. ■

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In Broadcast - May 2012

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