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Nov 13, 2006 12:00 PM
Can a Cubic-foot Production Suite Change the Industry?
By Dan Ochiva
Knockout Digital Media President Gil Chavez uses NewTek’s TriCaster to prepare for an ESPN Radio webcast.
Of course, anyone reading this isn't into turning out just another murky “shaky cam” production. Today, smart use of the latest camcorders and NLEs can take your ideas far beyond that.
But what if you want to move into live production? Whether you've found a gig covering local football or a rock concert, quality live production typically presents considerable hurdles. The gear's costlier, and tight, on-location production schedules confront you with realtime challenges such as color matching multiple cameras, switching, and incorporating graphic overlays.
Will a mobile production package work for you? If so, you're lucky. Today, an increasing number of capable products — such as Grass Valley's petite new Indigo AV mixer ($14,900), which can handle HD-SDI — enable you to pull together a competent kit.
But mixing and matching hardware takes a bit of expertise. Setup on the road for a live production can be frustrating when things start to go south. One solution: Packages such as Broadcast Pix's Studio 2000 digital production system ($24,000), which combines a standalone digital switcher, CG, still-store, and separate PC workstation.
A more compact, “luggable” approach is Sony's AWS-G500 Anycast Station ($19,500), which incorporates a switcher, audio mixer, streaming encoder, and server, with graphics provided by a separate PC.
But knock a 10th off those prices, add built-in graphics chops, and on-location production suddenly looks a lot more like YouTube on the loose. That's the promise of NewTek's TriCaster, which is cheaper ($4,995), smaller (about a cubic foot), and lighter (10lbs.) than anything else out there.
“We could blow the face off of live remote [radio] production with [the TriCaster],” says Gil Chavez, president of Orlando, Fla.-based Knockout Digital Media, a web engineering and design firm. “It's rare to find technology like this that allows you to bring a lot of different hats together. It's simple, too. I was doing a webcast within 10 minutes of opening the box.”
This past September, Chavez inaugurated a production package that travels with ESPN Radio's College GameDay talent and crew that produce a weekly radio and web show. It features eight hours of football coverage, talk, analysis, and lots of local color from the fans outside the stadium. (See espnradio.espn.go.com/espnradio/show?showId=collegegameday for more.)
The production package includes a TriCaster, seven DV camcorders, a wide-angle security camera (to show the shenanigans on the set), and the sponsored “Home Depot cam” (a simple, helmet-mounted wireless camera that provides ‘you are there’ crowd shots). A large plasma monitor entertains the crowd with the live web feed.
With previous standalone gear, you needed a crew to handle lighting, camera, and switching, Chavez says. “There's no budget for that. Now everyone gets in the act. … The camera guy might have to take a turn switching, for example. The industry will hate us.”
Business Intelligence: The Case for File-based Archiving
By Ian Russell, president of DiskStream
For many years, archiving on videotape was the only feasible option available to broadcasters, post houses, and corporate video production departments. There are, of course, a number of well-recognized drawbacks associated with tape. The most catastrophic of these are the inaccessibility of the media and inevitable migration that needs to occur as a tape format reaches the end of its life. These problems give rise to very significant costs — some of which are not immediately obvious, even to those closely involved with the archive itself.
Reuse rates of broadcast material within existing tape-based archives, for example, are relatively low. Facility managers routinely quote figures between 1 percent and 5 percent as the portion of material in their archives that ever gets reused. This does not mean that archived material is not useful; stock footage is very often re-shot simply because the material is too difficult to find in the archive. In these cases, the footage known to exist would be considerably easier and cheaper to use, but the inaccessibility of the tape-based archive makes the search-and-retrieve process simply too arduous.
The shift to tapeless, file-based infrastructures is inevitable. In the near future, video journalists will go into the field with little more than a solid-state camera and a laptop. File-based content will move conveniently and efficiently through production and broadcast workflows. In these environments in particular, consigning media assets to an inaccessible tape archive at the end of an otherwise tapeless workflow makes no sense at all.
File-based archiving offers a solution to the problems associated with tape. Fast, convenient search and low-resolution preview facilities, combined with drag-and-drop network transfer of material in and out of the archive, makes material totally accessible from any networked computer. With the right archive management system, and through the use of open file formats, migration to the next archive or storage technology can be largely automated.
Until recently, the prices of file-based archiving products have presented users with a significant barrier to adoption. Today's mass-market storage technologies, such as SATA drives and robotic, automated DVD libraries, offer outstanding value and high levels of reliability.
SATA hard disk drives and DVDs began life as consumer-grade products, but they have advanced to a point where they are highly attractive for professional applications. Many broadcasters are surprised to find that the current cost per gigabyte of raw SATA drive storage is less than 50 percent of the equivalent cost per gigabyte of the cheapest broadcast-grade videotape (with the cost per gigabyte for DVD at less than 10 percent).
Other than the underlying storage itself, a necessary component of a file-based archive system is a software application that manages media in the archive and automates various aspects of the archive workflow. The combination of low-cost file-based storage, network connectivity, and an archive management application can address the two major limitations of tape highlighted in previous sections: inaccessibility and high migration costs.
Although the weight of existing tape-based legacy infrastructures — combined with short budgeting cycles — can stifle investment in this area, it is important to consider archiving as a long-term investment.
Consider the scenario of a broadcaster producing around 90 minutes of local news per day. The average time to locate, preview, and qualify a piece of material from its tape archive might be on the order of 15 minutes. Assuming this broadcaster uses four clips from the archive per day, and that finding each clip might require an average of three clips to be previewed in order to find the right one, the labor needed to retrieve these four clips amounts to approximately three hours per day. This represents a significant degree of lost productivity or, at a conservative figure of $30 per hour (including overhead), unnecessary labor costs of around $30,000 per year incurred in simply finding material in the archive.
With a considered approach to adoption, a file-based archiving system can yield substantial cost savings and transform an archive into a significant asset.
Ian Russell, president of DiskStream, brings more than 15 years of high-tech management experience to the company.
