Harmonic’s Omneon MediaGrid storage system will form a central part of BBC Sport’s new file-based production system being established at MediaCity in Salford Quays, writes Adrian Pennington. The technology is designed to enable instant highlights creation and fast-turnaround edits.
The Omneon MediaGrid, which is being installed along with EVS live production systems, will provide central storage for up to 1,500 hours of HD content and support a fast edit workflow for the facility’s Final Cut Pro editors.
Within BBC Sport’s new live production workflow, sports events will be recorded onto EVS servers for logging and instant editing and also streamed to the Omneon MediaGrid via EVS XTAccess. The system will be capable of supporting 36 simultaneous ingests. 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 6Gbps and total usable storage capacity of 96TB, will be connected directly to FCP for creation of features and highlights packages, news-based packages, documentary-style content, and other edits in post-production. EVS FCP plug ins will facilitate search, import, and export functions, ensuring that finished content is delivered to the appropriate EVS playout server. The entire production system is scheduled to go live by the end of 2011.
