NEWS
It's an HD World After All
New York Conference Reveals Reality of Today's Productions
by Michael Grotticelli photos by John Clifford
 Avid's Booth. |
The stand-alone editing application is quickly evolving into a small but critical piece of a larger workflow process that can help satisfy a multitude of deliverables and distribution platforms. That’s because media organizations are being tasked with having to feed an ever-increasing pipeline to meet the demand for new business models, such as video-on-demand (VOD), DVDs, the Internet and mobile phones. In addition, as production departments slowly transition their operations to tapeless environments, managing the large volume of data ingested on a daily basis is becoming critically important.
Those were some of the messages at the recent HD World Conference and Exposition in New York City in October, where vendors showed their respective editing software, working among a number of other applications. In panels, broadcasters and other professional users stated their frustration in having to satisfy this increased demand for more HD channels with large file sizes (more bandwidth) in a world with fewer and fewer standards.
On the exhibit floor, Avid Technology showed the latest versions of its NewsCutter and Media Composer Adrenaline software, which runs within both Mac (Intel-based) and Windows environments. The company was demonstrating its new ability to natively edit files captured with Panasonic’s P2 solid-state memory and Sony’s XDCAM HD discs natively. This means no time-consuming transcoding is necessary. Most other editing applications are beginning to offer this ability as well, because it saves time and requires less external hardware.
An Avid company rep said the new functionality––shown in prototype at NAB in April and now in full working order––enables editors to work directly from a P2 card, for example, and file transfers are as fast as the Firewire card installed inside your computer.
 Harris Broadcast's booth. |
Harris Broadcast, as part of its new Advanced Media Platform, demonstrated the Velocity NX HD craft editing software (version 9.0) working on a NEXIO storage area network (SAN). Marketed as Velocity on SAN, the application provides access to dozens of users in a shared-storage environment. Up to seven Velocity NX editors can reside on a single SAN. Key to its functionality is “Intrinsic Mirroring” (patent pending) technology, which creates a duplicate copy of every file and writes it to two SANs simultaneously.
The company calls it “access without conflict” as it provides Fibre Channel and Ethernet redundancy for I/O availability. This requires double the storage capacity of other systems, but offers high reliability and redundancy. It’s designed for dozens or even hundreds of users and there’s no loss of performance, according to Harris.
 Tom McGowan, CEO of Quantel, Inc. at the booth. |
Quantel exhibited its NewBox (v. 3.6) editing solution attached to its new Mission asset management system. The new system, shown in prototype at NAB, is tightly integrated into the company’s ISA database environment, enabling media clips to be dragged and dropped onto the desktop during production.
Mission is comprised of several software modules. There’s Mission Central, which provides the core MAM database, keyframe shot generation, user log-on and production access. Users get instant access into it via Mission Tracker, which runs on all workstations attached to the system and uses Quantel menus to search and display media assets and associated metadata.
Mission Webview offers Web-based remote access and tracking. Mission Transfer provides a wide range of tools for managing the ingest of video, files and agency feeds, automatically handling transcoding material for web distribution and assigning automatic deletion dates as background tasks. Mission Capture extends metadata capture to include associated keyframe and text data from agency feeds, automatically extracting and presenting this to the user via Mission Tracker.
Mission Archive enables users to archive material out of the system and search and restore material for production use (its integration with ISA allows for entire projects, not just flattened files, to be saved). Finally, Mission Store is designed for customers wanting to create a complete software and hardware archive system. Mission Store is a combined disk and tape library offering enough storage capacity for 2-3 years’ worth of typical news production, according to the company.
EditShare demonstrated its shared storage system, which allows all connected workstations to capture, access and share in real time a common pool of media files. It uses RAID-5 protection without mirroring and “file-level” sharing that enables two or more editors to write to the same file simultaneously. Another interesting aspect to the system is that there are no seat licenses. Users can connect as many clients as they need, up to the limitations of the available storage and network bandwidth. At the show, EditShare also showed its new “Field” system, a rugged version of the existing storage product line that facilitates mobile editing applications.
 Dalet's booth. |
Dalet Digital Media Systems showed its shared-storage editing application, which is used at the new TMZ Channel on Fox. More than 70 editors can work on the system simultaneously, cutting footage shot with Sony XDCAM optical disc cameras. There’s a new extension for Final Cut Pro users, whereby a package is initially edited in FCP, then imported into the Dalet system for finishing and marrying it to other pieces in the overall program. Once a piece is in the system, it is available to anyone on the network.
Sony showed its XDCAM HD camcorder tied to a new PDW-V1 drive, designed for laptop editing in the field with FCP, Sony’s Vegas, Grass Valley’s Aurora and EDIUS, Adobe’s Premiere and other third-party applications. The new drive can accommodate both single-layer and double-layer discs and offers a 120 megabytes per seconds read/write speed, enabling three times real-time transfers.
Panel Discussions
The ongoing problem of having to deal with mixed formats for most HD projects
was part of several discussions during the technical sessions at the show.
During one, entitled “Intermixing Formats & HD Conversion,”
representatives from ABC, CBS and Verizon said that as more and more programs
are shared between networks, the need for a workflow that can accommodate
both 1080i, 720p and soon 1080p—all at 24 frames per second—was
taxing their current legacy systems and often resulted in their having to
create three and four copies of the same file to send to the various delivery
platforms.
They all agreed that there was a need for an industry standard solution that would see files created once and distributed to many outlets simultaneously with the least amount of effort. The need for a file-based solution to address multiple regions of the world is critical.
“It’s not about resolution anymore,” said Rich Wolf, senior vice president of network operations and engineering at ABC. “It’s about aspect ratio and format conversion.” He added that ABC parent, the Walt Disney Company, wants most programs to be produced in the 1080p/24fps format so that it can extract all other SD and HD formats for all of its platforms around the world. Sophisticated encoding environments will need to be established for this, according to Chris Ehrendbard, director of broadcast distribution.
The Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA, formerly AAF), in its continuing effort to bring the industry to some kind of consensus on all things relating to production and post (some will remember the work of AAF in the handling of editing files for post-production, which began in the mid-‘90s and is still not complete), is supporting a proposal developed by Turner Broadcasting System for an MXF mastering file format. It would benefit broadcasters and post houses that deal with international clients and multiple versions of a single project.
At the NAB convention, AMWA sponsored a demonstration of a prototypical way of creating a single master file, known as an inventory file, where a variety of metadata descriptors would live. This file would help time-synchronize the audio and video elements, instructing a video server, for example, to automatically pair English subtitles with a Dutch language audio track and video content, for distribution to the Netherlands.
The new wrapper would include two parts: an MXF inventory file containing
instructions on how to render any one of several different versions of the
content, and a number of essence files (video, audio tracks, subtitles, opening
and closing credits in various languages). The essence files would be combined
using instructions contained in the inventory file to render a complete version,
which might then be sent to broadcasters in a particular country.
For a large organization like ABC and CBS, this strategy would save them significant
amounts of time and money, which is supporting its more than two dozen SD
and HD channels around the world.
Elsewhere, during a panel dedicated to the distribution of surround sound audio for HD video productions, it was clear that true 5.1 mixing is the exception to the rule. It was stated several times that producers should specify, in metadata that can travel along with the video programming, what type of audio format in which they would like their shows to be presented. Representatives from Canadian Television (CTV), Dolby Labs, NBC Universal and PBS said that, in general, networks want to do as little work as possible on an audio file before distribution. Having the ability to simply pass it along the chain with minimal or no additional mixing and sweetening ensures that the program producer will be happy with the final broadcast.
CTV, for example, delivers all of its news programs in a 5.1-compatible format (LCR) on its HD channel. Michael Nunan, post sound supervisor at CTV, said it requires a very sophisticated audio mixing technique. For an experienced audio mixer, it’s easier to work in 5.1 than in two-channel stereo.
According to Jim Starzynski, principal engineer of advanced technology at NBC Universal, his network is now in discussions about acquiring 5.1 audio for such news/live shows as Today and Nightly News with Brian Williams, but it won’t happen until late 2008 at the earliest. On the local level, there’s a resistance among stations because of the complexity of creating and broadcasting surround sound audio. Competition will stimulate this move, but the real question is: How soon? This has been proven on the network level. In 2003, NBC did no 5.1 audio for dramas. As of September 2004, 14 out of 14 have been delivered in 5.1 surround.
All of the panelists said that their companies are committed to full bandwidth 5.1 sound, because of the huge increase in home theatre systems in the US and abroad. However, stereo audio will still dominate television broadcast for the foreseeable future.
Michael Grotticelli regularly reports on the broadcast and professional video technology industries.
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