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Since the dawn of television, studios around the globe have relied on coaxial cables to connect the broadcast world: cameras to recorders to mixers to routers to encoders. But studio coax may be on the brink of extinction. Like their colleagues in headends and uplinks, video engineers are swapping 75-ohm coax for IP cables.
Metadata in Production. We have been keeping records in media for well over a hundred years. 3x5 index cards, and yellow legal tablets on a clip board were once the tools of the production assistant and librarian. Major studios all had their forms that production had to keep, which ended up in folders and later boxes. Some might have been (accidentally) stored with the media, along with the scripts and notes of the production staff. In a well managed production someone was tasked with keeping those records for everyone to access as the production moved from principal and second unit shooting to post production and release
The transition to an IP architecture has created significant changes in command and control and in how systems are monitored and managed. Command and control is the all encompassing automated set of processes that control the acquisition, file movement, handling and delivery of media. Monitoring is more than a set of scopes and meters. Dashboards and browsers provide the system monitoring tools to manage the handling and Quality Control of media and metadata in the entire facility.
There have been many significant changes in the core technologies that make up the infrastructure of the broadcast facility. The cable plant is or was the heart of the broadcast facility. And there are many different types of cables. Now the IP network is the primary backbone and the IP routers and switches play a significant role in media transport, command and control and monitoring. There are many layers within the IP topology. In an SDI environment most of these layers communicate or transport media using different cables and/or fiber optics and are managed by a different type of switching, routing and distribution architecture. In the IP world these layers are known as VLANs (Virtual Local Area Networks) which are segments within the core IP network. Instead of individual cables the IP network can be segmented and each of the different signal types co-exist in the same packet stream using the same routing and switching environment on the same cable and/or fiber. They can do this while being isolated, traveling separately and protected.
Most people with memories of analogue tape-based broadcast programme-making will acknowledge the tremendous efficiencies brought about by the advent of production servers, especially within the fields of news, sport and special events.
Let’s say you or your company own a very valuable artistic work of media — a film like Casablanca, perhaps. How would you go about protecting the digital master file of Casablanca against data corruption, fire, theft or some other unforeseen natural disaster?
This article will be the first in a series that will continue for a while. I hope to explore some aspects of workflow for modern media and create some clarity about terms, trends, pitfalls, and successes. I am also hoping that as we explore this together you will feed back questions and comments that might steer future postings in the series to be more useful to you in the future.
How can we maintain flawless multi-channel broadcasting and multi-platform streaming without giving operators information overload? Monitoring by exception is widely accepted as a vital capability. But to gain all its benefits, the monitoring system needs to interpret more than just the hardware and software error messages. It needs to understand what is passing through the system, too.
