In Broadcast - April 2013 - 76

I N T E R N A T I O N A L

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 18 - APRIL 2013

N E W S

InSTUDIO

Easing The Flow From Production To Post
As innovative production-based solutions make their way into the market, shifts in basic post-production
workﬂows are ever more evident…

By Kieron Seth
Contributing Editor

recall watching a sequence being
edited at BBC Leeds in 1996. The
endless shuttling of VTRs, waiting
for tapes to come in by courier and
for feeds to be sent. The impression
I was left with was an object lesson
in skill, patience and expert timing.
The adept editor crafted a piece on
local train services into a concise
three minute clip to make the
evening news deadline. The process
was analogue which seems alien in
today’s connected landscape.

Production & Post

The original promise of non-linear
production has been thoroughly
exceeded by today’s technology.
The earliest Panasonic P2 workﬂow
suggested media ingest, desktop
edit and storage on either tape
or hard drives. Panasonic’s own
2005 in-house magazine Beyond
makes several oblique references
to the goal of an IT infrastructure,
but how and when an organisation
could make that transition and what
it would look like is left entirely to
the reader’s imagination. The
emphasis is squarely on the beneﬁts
of solid state production. Tellingly,
Panasonic coined the term ING –
IT News Gathering. This is still
very much about niche journalistic
video acquisition, not end-to-end
tapeless media workﬂows for every
production crew.
The vision is deﬁned in the same
magazine by Italian customer
Digivideo SNC which is quoted very
presciently predicting the “possibility
to create on an optional SD card (by
using the proxy [sic] video optional
card) of Mpeg4 ﬁles that can be
visualised from the journalist on
a pocket PC during the trip back

to the station and eventually to be
transmitted through UMTS. We
believe that in a near future the P2
camcorder could be connected
directly with digital nets via modem
(integrated in the same camcorder).”
The promise of remote production
is clearly an early aspiration for
tapeless camera crews, even if the
manufacturers were not so bold as
to make the same forecast.

Connected Workﬂows
Seven years on, Panasonic
launched its HPX600 at NAB
2012. Its connectivity meets all
the aspirations set out by the
Italian company, and delivers even
more. The 600 is one of the ﬁrst
cameras to offer wireless metadata
management, clip management,
clip editing and media delivery via
an untethered controlling iPad.
Demonstrating the concept at IBC
2012 with playlists being created
remotely on the camera’s P2 card
and played out via the SDI, Technical
Product Manager Luc Barra said
that it was the fastest workﬂow he
had ever seen.
The sequence that he wirelessly
created can be exported over
Ethernet or WiFi directly onto central
servers via FTP.
Back in 2005, YouTube was at
its preview stage: online video
platforms were largely irrelevant.
Camera operators today, however,
have to view Internet delivery as a
parallel distribution media. Tellingly
therefore, cameras such as HPX600
and JVC’s GY-HM650 offer the
option of dual codec recording –
the possibility of simultaneously
capturing full resolution HD and
web-ready proxy files.

GB Labs Mini Portable Storage

The transition to a fully IT
production to post-production
workflow has clearly gone way
beyond the original core concept
of tapeless capture and ingest onto
hard disk. Today’s television and
post-production facilities employ
automated processes to ingest, log,
transcode, quality control, clone and
archive media, as well as making it
immediately available over networks
to collaborative teams of editors.
Speed programming is now
endemic. It is not just news slots
that need content fast, pressure
on budgets and the consequent
expectation of fast turn-around video
for everything from documentaries to
art programming means that editing
has to start instantly.
In response, developers such as
GB Labs manufacture super-fast
editing platforms with the portability
to create content collaboratively
in the field. Broadcasters such
as Thomson Reuters now send
their international video journalists
with a Space Mini to ingest
and cut complete programmes
from anywhere.
Ben Pearce of GB Labs
commented: “The device was
originally built for location news
crews but it’s now difﬁcult to think of
a sector that doesn’t need to shoot
and edit on the run. We see Mini
Space, especially the SSD version,
on ﬁlm sets and drama productions.
There is now virtually no gap between
the shoot and the post stage.”

Enterprise Solutions

Panasonic WiFi Workﬂow

An organisation working toward a
total workﬂow framework is Grass
Valley which is fast developing
Stratus – a comprehensive
solution that combines production
tools, device control and asset
management via a single interface.

Its service oriented architecture
enables users to plug in various
Grass Valley components, such as
the Edius non-linear editor or the K2
SAN. It also accommodates third
party applications from the likes
of Avid and Apple and any MOS
compliant newsroom system. Its
support for importing XDCAM
and P2 content goes beyond
plain ingest. Its RMI (Removable
Media Interface) tool detects clips
resident on a camera and allows the
technician to trim and select ﬁles
before they are brought onto the
server. Stratus can also schedule
broadcast recording with capture
automatically as high-resolution
and proxy files.
Russian satellite broadcaster
NTV-Pus installed Stratus in time
for the London Olympics in order
to streamline its entire workﬂow
from production to playout. The
system consisted of 13 Grass Valley
Stratus workstations for viewing and
quick-cut editing, along with ﬁve full
blooded Grass Valley EDIUS NLEs
attached to the SAN. The Stratus
workstations were also used for
playback control in the absence
of an automated system. With all
elements integrated under Stratus,
interface issues were avoided
and the system is said to have
proved robust.
The London NTV-Plus team
was located in the International
Broadcasting Center (IBC), in
a studio in Wimbledon (as the
ofﬁcial broadcaster for the tennis
championships), and in its central
studio in Westminster. These three
locations were interconnected
with NTV-Plus in Moscow. Staff in
Westminster could see the material
from the IBC, and the Moscow
CONTINUED ON PAGE 78

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