Norwegian national broadcaster NRK has successfully gone to air with the OmniBus Opus media asset management system (MAM) as part of its Programme Bank project to provide powerful MAM facilities to its 13 regional broadcasting centres and Oslo-based archive. The system provides access and direct control over programmes in production, raw assets and archive material to 3000 users across NRK’s 13 regional domains and Oslo production HQ, writes Fergal Ringrose.
NRK’s children’s entertainment department was the first to go on air with Programme Bank, and it will be followed by other production departments by the end of the year. This complex and powerful implementation of OmniBus Opus provides streamlined integration of the many new and existing technologies forming part of NRK’s system, as well as unprecedented metadata handling with Opus Event Logging and Transfer Manager. Operators can add custom-indexed metadata to provide powerful searching in Opus PinPoint using synonym, phonetic and proximity search criteria, while Opus Transfer Manager automates the transfer of hi-res and low-res browse versions of the material, together with all keyframes and metadata, in a single transfer operation.
“The Opus technology developed for NRK, including Transfer Manager, provides a new benchmark in the transfer of material with sophisticated metadata between multiple domains,” said Linda Taylor, project manager, OmniBus Systems.
NRK’s editors can browse available material in the Opus system and make shot selections of key events before transferring them into Final Cut Pro for editing and eventual transfer to the playout servers or archive system. Opus implements a number of automated workflows in the Programme Bank system, including automatic transfer of material to NRK’s subtitling department and the subsequent viewing of low-res browse versions with subtitles.
An important component of the Programme Bank concept is provided by Opus SmartClient, which allows any authorised user to access and browse NRK’s assets from any computer via a standard web browser. SmartClient allows any number of NRK’s staff to view material in the asset library, regardless of location and without requiring additional client software.
“NRK set out to create a world-beating production and asset management system in Programme Bank,” said Hroar Pettersen, head of technology, NRK. “The Opus technology provides a crucial element in our architecture, and with the Opus SmartClient we have the potential for almost limitless flexibility in access to our assets. This stage of the implementation and the successful launch of the system with the Children’s Channel is an important milestone along the way.”
Opus makes systemwide searches available to users across all of NRK’s regions, providing intranet searching, browse and keyframe viewing across the varied platforms comprising NRK’s installations. Staff at an OmniBus Desktop can control routing and machine operation via a consistent and unified user interface, whether ingesting from an XDCAM, browsing the archive or producing a shot selection and exporting content to a craft editor.
