Radio Bremen, founded in 1945, is ARD's smallest regional broadcasting agency. Halving ARD's financial compensation reduced the broadcaster's revenue annually by a third of the budget. Because of this, a package of measures was developed which included combining radio and television on a shared site. Introducing file-based television production also meant that it was necessary to enhance program material usability, as well as processes regarding central administration, archiving, and trimedial use. This project, along with the later upgrade of the networked production systems, was implemented by BFE.
Assignment:
BFE was entrusted with the task of acting as a general contractor for the planning, installation, and initial startup of the entire technical media infrastructure at the new broadcasting center.
Therefore, the new broadcasting center building needed a central trimedial media asset management and editorial system with a standardized user interface for the estimated workflow. TV, radio and online editorial teams should be able to select, research, view and use integrated editors to pre-edit their material from topic research and planning. The center also needed to accommodate both production work and digital archives.
BFE was also commissioned as the general contractor for the production systems upgrade that took place a few years later. The aim was to avoid broadcasting disruptions during this upgrade.
Solution:
The product suite from d’accord (Media Center, Libraries, News Center, Topic Center, Topic Schedule, Daily Schedule.TV) was used as a media asset management and editorial system. The Media Center and Libraries act as a media asset management system. It is available to staff from the TV, radio, and online editorial teams as a shared front end.
For TV, a VPMS (Video Production Management System) was integrated as a video essence management system, which is used as a subsystem for recording, viewing, and pre-editing video content.
The central production memory was divided into logical storage pools on account of the wide variety of application access patterns. It was then implemented into a SAN file system.
Two IBM tape robots were integrated as a digital archive for video and video transfer archiving and control operations.
The update took place as a parallel structure and initial startup of the HD systems for the SD production environment currently in operation. The gradual migration of the technical infrastructure from SDTV to HDTV was continued, and existing infrastructure was updated as far as possible. As a result, ongoing operations were not affected.
Highlights:
Construction of an efficient trimedial broadcasting center offering TV, radio, and online content
Powerful MAM and editorial system at the heart of the project
Equipment details:
D’accord production suite with Media Center, Libraries, News Center, Topic Center, Topic Schedule, Daily Schedule.TV
Arvato Systems VPMS management system (S4M)
Central production memory: SAM system (DataDirect Networks S2A9500)
Ingest server system
IBM tape robots
Upgrade:
D’accord CMS/Newsroom System
Dalet Amberfin transcoder
Fesad archive system
Adobe Premiere video editing system
Harmonic Omneon video server
Technology:
SAN system: DataDirect Networks S2A9500 with 57 TB of storage capacity and 1.2 Gbyte/s of I/O bandwidth
SAN file system: Quantum StorNext
11 editing suites and 6 graphics processing workstations (Apple FinalCut Pro)
Windows-based NAS cluster for indirect access
Ingest server system: Omneon Spectrum with 9 ingest channels and 2 emergency playout channels, storage capacity approx. 1.5 TB
Playout server system: Omneon Spectrum with 13 channels, storage capacity approx. 73 GB
2 IBM tape robots
Main: TS3500 with 6 LTO-3 drives and 280 LTO-3 tapes
Backup: TS3500 with 6 LTO Drives and 280 LTO-3 tapes in the mainframe, plus 220 LTO-3 tapes in the extension frame
Archiving and restoration via VPMS control via IBM ADMIRA interface
Video transfer between ingest server, production memory, playout server and archive, also via VPMS control
Upgrade:
Production server: Harmonic Omneon
Video server: SAW
Aveco Astra system