Distance Editing

For the 17 days of nonstop Beijing Olympics broadcast and web and mobile streaming, NBC worked closely with vendors such as Omneon to pull together a flexible system that enabled editors working in New York to start editing minutes after files were uploaded in China.

It's no secret: In February, the United States changes to a full DTV broadcast envionment. Turns out it's a good time to look at production systems that not only address the difficulties of HD editing — think clogged bandwidth — but use the advantages of the Internet and other networks to pool groups of editors running lower-cost hardware, which is an increasingly attractive concept as the economy heads south.

To solve the immense logistics of pulling together a 17-day, around-the-clock HD production for the Beijing Summer Olympics, NBC's David Mazza — senior vice president, engineering, NBC Olympics — and his team integrated a system that offered near-realtime distribution of HD originals plus proxy material to editors half a world away. Along with his team of engineers, Mazza worked closely with vendors such as Omneon (MediaDeck media servers, MediaGrid active storage systems, and ProCast CDN transport engines); Cyradis Technology (realtime control); Blue Order (Media Archive media asset management); MOG Solutions (HD/SD file conforming); Avid (Unity Isis storage, editing); Isilon Systems (Isilon IQ storage); and Anystream (transcoding).

The proxy-based workflow minimized network traffic between the two cities. “But getting all the gear to handshake and work together well is not as easy nor as in-expensive as you might think — or the finance department might hope for,” says Mazza, who began his Olympic career with NBC at the 1988 Seoul summer games.

Even if such a setup poses perils in pulling together never-before-vetted combinations of gear for onsite storage, transcoding, and international transmission, the chance to trim travel budgets for a massive international event remains an obvious attraction. NBC offered more than 3,600 hours of broadcast, cable, and web coverage, so keeping dozens of editors, graphic artists, and web producers working in the States was key.

NBC first experimented with offsite editing for the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy, editing promos back in the United States. That initial trial, however, faced problems: The available transmission couldn't deliver files fast enough for timely production. “If you don't have the proper file-acceleration software,” Mazza says, “you'll never come close to maximizing the use of those expensive pipes you've paid for.”

That changed with the Beijing games. Two Omneon ProCast CDN transport engines (one in each city) used replication techniques and WAN acceleration to maximize the allocated 400Mbps of data bandwidth. Added to that was another 1.2Gbps of bandwidth for the transport of more than 60 separate program feeds. The resulting proxy streams enabled a new production scheme that greatly boosted viewers to NBC's website; 30 shot-pickers at the New York headquarters worked on inexpensive PCs to select and create assembly edits of popular events, yielding more than 5,000 different user-accessible highlight clips.

Don't have millions coming in from ad revenues to pull such a system together? You might want to consider a turnkey system such as Sony's IT-based HDXchange, with system prices starting at $60,000. Shipping since late 2006, this networked hardware/software suite, not surprisingly, integrates especially well with Sony camcorders — although editing can be done on a variety of NLE apps.
The need here? Build a metadata-aware HD editing network around the HDXchange server, a system that can be used locally or over a wide-area network (WAN) via the Browser app. At any one time, a limited number of users (up to about 20) can browse, search, edit, and manage content that's stored natively in Sony's MPEG (long GOP) HD file format.

At NAB 2008, a more potent system debuted: HDXchange Extreme uses a larger network-attached server system (NASS) to deliver enough bandwidth to connect an “unlimited number” of clients, according to the company.

Don't want to invest in even that much hardware? Try editing on a subscription basis. For that, check out MaxEdit Web Edition from Maximum Throughput. The Montreal-based company, known for its post-oriented storage systems, announced both a server-based system — MAXedit Server Edition, similar to HDXchange — and the MAXedit Web Edition platform at IBC 2008. Available this month, the hosted web app is one of the first Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) models for professional-level editing, ready whenever and wherever you are.