In Broadcast June 2012 - 54

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 9 - JUNE 2012

InMEDIA
HD/SD Media Newsroom Has Global Presence
By Warren Arenstein, VP of Business Development, Primestream
Primestream’s FORK production suite provides a cutting-edge, metadata-driven, modular approach for broadcast media operations, production and playout. Founded in 1980 as the ﬁrst 24-hour, all-news channel, Cable News Network (CNN) is now a highly successful leader in the news and information world. With cable channels including CNN, CNN International, and Headline News, along with the CNN.com online component, CNN offers programming in more than 212 countries and territories worldwide and is seen in more than 100 million US households. CNN recently completed a multi-year transition from tape-based, analogue operations to 100% digital, non-linear and high-definition production, which included an installation of Primestream’s FORK Production Suite. solution to CNN, but the challenge was ﬁnding one willing to adapt its product to the company’s s t r i n g e n t speciﬁcations and critical timetables. In contrast, we could see that Primestream was capable of developing and implementing a lot of functionality specifically for CNN, which made the decision much easier. For example, CNN’s interaction with the team at Primestream led to the creation CNN feeds desk of FORK’s Live Assist module for newsroom playout automation. Another appealing aspect of FORK is that it’s QuickTime-based, which offers a scalable, open architecture allowing for additional development and functionality as our production needs evolve.
Warren Arenstein

CNN Evolution
When I first arrived at CNN Washington in 2004, the production centre was almost completely tapebased. In responding to a mandate to convert all of our daily production news edit rooms to non-linear systems with shared storage, the bureau chief and I had a preference towards Apple’s Final Cut Pro (FCP) for editing - but that left a gap in the workﬂow for automatically ingesting all the incoming feeds. We were introduced to FORK and we could see that it offered strong potential to meet all of our ingest requirements.

System Overview
The current installation at CNN includes approximately 60 FORK production clients and 18 Final Cut edit stations sharing content on a 60TB SAN shared storage network. Eight media coordinator ingest stations in the media operations area are responsible for scheduling all ingests and playing out content to other bureaus and afﬁliates. The system handles 18 XDCAM HD ingest streams and 16 playout streams.

to automatically record as recurring events using FORK Scheduled Clip Ingest. As the day goes on, the media coordinators add events to be ingested as the news situation warrants, and they also log content and add keyframe markers. As the editors start getting busy around noon, they ﬁnd all the content they need ready in the shared storage. They browse and search with FORK Content Navigator and send footage from FORK to FCP for craft editing. Completed edits are then sent back to FORK for playout through Live Assist to either the monitor wall in ‘The Situation Room’, or straight to air.

Deploying Fork
In addition to Primestream, several other providers wanted to offer a

Unique Workﬂow
CNN’s delivery requirements also included the need to interface with existing footage archives. Primestream integrated the DC FORK system with the Atlanta archive via an XML scripting mechanism, which allowed operators to deliver content to the archive and also to request content back from the archive digitally. Over the course of working with Primestream, we really appreciated their willingness to scale, develop, and modify FORK to meet ongoing requirements as our workﬂows

evolved. Primestream’s tight focus on a scalable solution for the speciﬁcs of newsroom operations and central media storage was critical to its success with CNN. It was better for us to ﬁnd companies that can provide solutions for installations that have speciﬁc requirements as opposed to always going for a network-wide solution from the beginning. Some providers tried to promise an all-encompassing solution for CNN and later realised that they couldn’t accomplish the R&D and investment necessary to deliver on the timeline that the network required. With Primestream, CNN discovered many advantages, beginning with the cost savings and later by realising how much more storage, editing capabilities, and functionality were possible using FORK. ■

Workﬂow
A typical work day at the CNN DC bureau using FORK goes like this: The network morning news shows are set

CNN Media Operators running FORK Production and Live Assist Playout

CNN Express Bus

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In Broadcast June 2012

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