The Omneon MediaGrid active storage system from Harmonic will provide central storage for up to 1,500 hours of HD content and support a fast edit-in-place workflow at the BBC’s much-vaunted new facility in Salford Quays, Greater Manchester.
Within BBC Sport’s new live production workflow, sports events will be recorded onto EVS servers for logging and instant editing, and will also be streamed to the Omneon MediaGrid via EVS XTAccess. The scalable system will be capable of supporting 36 simultaneous ingests, while up to 200 journalists and producers will be able to search and view a proxy version of footage using EVS IP Browse.
The Omneon MediaGrid system, providing aggregate bandwidth up to 6 Gbps and total usable storage capacity of 96 TB, will be connected directly to Final Cut Pro for the creation of features and highlights packages, news-based packages, documentary-style content and other edits in post-production. The entire production system is scheduled to go live by the end of 2011.
“BBC has relied on Omneon server systems for more than a decade, and now with its shift to a faster and more agile file-based live sports production system, the company also has chosen to implement an Omneon storage solution,” said Geoff Stedman, senior vice-president for corporate marketing at Harmonic. “The Omneon MediaGrid storage system offers the high performance and resilience that are critical in live broadcast applications, and we are confident it will provide the same performance for future sports broadcasts from Manchester.”
