In Broadcast - August 2016 - 34


34

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 6 - Issue 8 | August 2016

InForm

Video Over IP - Pandora's Box Or A Bright
New Future?
cont'd...

The Current State
Evertz announced at NAB that it had
joined the AIMS Alliance. Being part of
the AIMS Alliance isn't simply a badge
you can use to advertise your products
as being IP compliant; you have to sign
up to the AIMS roadmap. That includes
VSF-TR03, which could be the most
important piece of the Video over IP
jigsaw as it addresses the handling of
video, audio and ancillary data streams
in real-time over standard IP networks.
Where this leaves ASPEN nobody at
the show seemed 100% sure, but it
does now add considerable strength
to the AIMS alliance as broadcasters
now have a choice of manufacturers
who have signed up to AIMS, including
Sony, Panasonic and Its originator
Grass Valley.
Grass Valley announced that it was
joining the Sony Networked Media
Interface alliance and this alliance
does now contain a significant number
of key manufacturers.
Also don't forget to keep an eye on

Newtek and its NDI offering; a number
of manufacturers are adding this to
their products and it could be making a
late run up the rails.
But what do broadcasters think?
One I spoke to at the show still favours
SMPTE 2022/6 as it is manufactureragnostic, but SMPTE 2022-5/6 are a
simple IP standard and are simply
there to transition the industry from
SDI to IP without the benefits.
Sony's NMI certainly has a large
number
of
supporters.
Sony's
demonstration at NAB 2016 did
demonstrate a multi-vendor end-toend IP workflow. At the Rio Olympics,
TV Globo will be using a hybrid SDI and
IP solution based on NMI.
Alternatives
But
what
alternatives
do
broadcasters have if they still don't
feel Video over IP is mature enough to
invest in?
At the show there were a number
of 12G-SDI product launches. Utah

Scientific is leading the way with a
12G-SDI router and also announced
at the show a new 12G-SDI alliance
that includes companies like Axon and
Leader.
12G-SDI does overcome the 4 x
3G cabling issue broadcasters are
objecting to, but this method does not
come cheap. If your budget is limited,
don't look this way.
Going back to the Grand National
analogy, as we start the second circuit
of the course, a hybrid IP / SDI solution
is the only working solution at the
current time. Your split between SDI
and IP is dependent on the amount of
risk you are prepared to take.
If you can, you will design a system
that allows you to migrate the SDI
components out as the IP products and
standards mature, but this could mean
throwing away SDI products before
you have maximised your return on
investment.
The one certainty in that change will
always be present. With the IT world
looking at 2.5G and 25G networks,
that good old fashioned bespoke niche

infrastructure that broadcasters are
familiar with might have more going
for it than we currently realise.
Kevin Salvidge is the
Managing Director of
Hatstands
Broadcast
& Media Productions
Limited, a UK based company that is
rapidly gaining an international client
base.
Hatstands Broadcast & Media
Productions Limited is a Sales
& Technical Consultancy service
company, specializing within the
Professional Broadcast and Media
sectors.
Established in 2014, by Kevin
Salvidge, the objective of Hatstands
Broadcast & Media Productions
Limited is to provide both
broadcasters, content creators and
manufacturers with the necessary
information, so that they can
maximise the returns on their
investments in an ever changing
technological
and
operating
environment.

Intelligent Storage: The Unlikely
Hero Of The Media World
By Jeff Greenwald at HGST,
a Western Digital Corporation

T

wenty years ago a major animation
film would require a mere 10GB of
storage to produce, for today's movies
the amount is measured in multipetabytes. As motion pictures evolve
- moving from SD to HD and now to
4K and 8K video formats - file size has
grown at an incredible rate. This has
put media asset managers and content
professionals
under
tremendous
pressure to balance storage needs with
budgets while enhancing key asset
infrastructure, data durability, and
resiliency.
If we look at storage requirements
for a movie with a typical runtime
of 130 minutes, the numbers are
staggering. An 8K format version of
a movie could use up to 46.5TB of
storage capacity. Then, when adding
the multiple transcoded formats for
each movie with different screen sizes

and distribution methods, the amount
of content storage for a single movie
can easily exceed 100TB.
Storage Pressure Points
Increased metadata creation for
that content puts pressure on the
storage infrastructure as much as - or
even more than - the actual content
itself. For instance, today's cameras
automatically create a tremendous
amount of data about the video or
images they capture, such as aperture,
frame rate, shutter speed, and more.
In addition to the growing amount of
content that media and entertainment
studios have to deal with, the
complexity of the digital workflows
handling that content is becoming
impossible to manage. From ingest
to playout, media content goes
through multiple stages, creating

various intermediate versions of the
digital media that must be stored and
managed.
Looking To The Clouds
To help manage this data for the
television and movie industry,
Media Asset Manager
(MAM)
software
is being migrated
to the cloud to
organise, centralise
and
manage
multimedia content
and the correlating
metadata. A cloudcompatible
MAM
can manage all of
the data, metadata,
workflows,
and
distribution in a
single application,
greatly simplifying
ingest and postproduction activities.

As a result, many top major and
independent studios are now opting
for scalable object storage, which
is able to adapt easily as content
continues to grow and ensure that the
content isn't lost in a ramshackle mess
of file or storage silos.
Innovative data storage and
management is becoming the
unlikely saviour of the Media and
Entertainment
industry,
thanks
to the ever-growing explosion
of data putting stress on
existing
storage
and
production
technology.
Media professionals now
need
scalable
object
storage combined with
a powerful, cloud-based
MAM to meet the needs of
demanding, modern digital
content creation. Media
organisations
that
are
already choosing intelligent
storage put themselves in
the best position to adapt
to
the
ever-innovating
and data-hungry media
Alps landscape.
http://www.inbroadcast.com http://www.hatstandsbroadcast.com/ https://www.hgst.com/
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of In Broadcast - August 2016
