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MillimeterOlympian Storage
Apr 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
Bill Lorenz, project manager for NBC's editing facilities at the 2006 Olympic Winter Games in Torino, Italy, worked his fifth Olympics this year. Ten days after the Games ended in February, he was still in Torino, helping tear down NBC's international broadcast center (IBC) that served as the hub of the network's effort to capture a majority of the events using high-definition cameras, employ wireless HD systems for the first time, edit and produce material in realtime at 1080i/50 resolution, and broadcast the Olympics in HD during primetime for the first time.
From Torino, Lorenz told Millimeter that NBC's engineering team was pleased with the achievement of its primary goal during the Olympics: to efficiently capture and edit massive amounts of HD imagery, while seamlessly connecting and sharing data between editorial locations on a massive Avid-based network. That network was built around six Avid Unity ISIS systems, three Avid Unity LANshare shared-storage systems, and one classic Unity system that collectively handled 119TB of storage, according to Lorenz. Those storage pods safeguarded data flowing out of 27 Media Composer Adrenaline systems at the IBC facility, all equipped with Avid's DNxcel board for HD capture and realtime editing. An additional 11 HD Media Composer Adrenaline systems joined the pipeline from venues around Torino (along with six SD systems at a handful of locations), and imagery also flowed into the network from selected EVS HD editing systems, using IP Director to allow interoperability with the Avid infrastructure. Three more HD Media Composer systems and another classic Unity storage system located at NBC headquarters in New York were remotely tied into the IBC network, dedicated exclusively to the Olympic broadcasts.
Lorenz says the goal was to make sure that NBC's storage approach would be significantly improved from the one used during the 2004 Olympic Summer Games in Athens, Greece.
“Our big challenge was how to store all this HD footage,” he says. “Normal storage products would saturate around 20TB, so we came up with a specific scheme. At the last Olympics [in Athens], we had little pods of storage in the International Broadcast Center, built around one big Unity system serving each of them. All of them were tied together through Ethernet, but we did not have a cohesive work group. This time, we decided to have two major work groups — the first built around graphics, which amounted to 11 Media Composers served by one Isis system [40TB], and the second built around a group of editors putting together features, housed in another Isis system [24TB]. We connected these two storage systems together with [Avid's] Transfer Manager system, allocated storage between them as needed, and we had managers for each work group, rather than a single manager. We also had the Media Composers and Unity system in New York, which had access via a dedicated high-speed network to Torino's proxies and HD media. We called that project Edit at Home.
“This easily surpasses anything we have ever done, and in fact, it's the biggest storage element I have ever heard of,” he explains. “It may be the biggest HD facility ever put together [for broadcast]. The ISIS storage system was an absolute must for pulling the whole thing off.”
Lorenz says NBC now has its sights set on another improvement for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China. Lorenz says, “[That improvement is] to find a common codec between all these machines and a proxy format for communicating and editing between different devices. That would make show creation easier. We feel we have a handle on the media management issue for doing this in HD, but now we want to speed it up, and we could do that if we used a proxy approach. We hope to have a handle on that by Beijing.”
