Managing Assets to Maximize Impact

EVENT RECORDING
For conferences and crusade events we basically built a six camera HD TV truck, only not in a truck. Our broadcast engineer Brian Laschober partnered with Bill McKee of Broadcast Technical Services in Houston to create a multicam system that is rack mounted in flight packs so it can be shipped anywhere in the world. We use the new Sony HSC-300 triax cameras recording to Sony XDCAM HD 4:2:2 at 50Mb 1080i. The flight packs are engineered as HD-SDI throughout and switched on a Ross Synergy switcher. We use Miranda multi-view and routing technology and Sony and Marshall monitoring.

Our studio in St. Louis mirrors this setup with a four camera switched system permanently installed.

In the course of a typical conference we go through 96 50GB XDCAM HD disks, with each of those disks holding roughly 90 minutes of 1080i footage. At these events we record 24 tracks of iso audio, captured directly to disk using an iZ Technology RADAR digital recording system, and Tascam DA-98s as backup. We temp mix onsite to the XDCAM discs but always post the audio in ProTools before it goes to TV, radio, web, CDs, or DVDs.

POST PRODUCTION
Post production and asset management begins as all of this media gets labeled, bar coded and entered into our vault library system. The footage is then ingested to our shared storage by an assistant editor or an editor who identifies clip names for batch digitizing. We have about 64TB of usable space for video post on Xsan, another 24TB for motion graphics and web on Xsan, and about six more terabytes for audio post on Studio Network Solutions SANmp. We have quickly found that this is not a lot of space, we are constantly challenged by the needs to manage it as we push its limits.

When we moved to high-definition, we worked hard to reduce the ambient noise in the edit suites. We extended everything with KVM cabling to get the CPU out of the room. The only things in each suite are a desk, a 30-inch Apple monitor, speakers, waveform/vectorscope, a keyboard and a mouse. Additionally, each suite has a software control panel for the router, so that any source or output is available with the press of a button.

Editorial is spread across 15 Final Cut Pro edit suites, two FCP ingest stations, and 9 Pro Tools rooms. In addition to our video and audio editors our team of 50 broadcast professionals also includes two quality controllers, two motion graphics artists, six producers, two engineers, two cinematographers, a production assistant, three duplication specialists, a DVD producer, support staff, and a newly created digital content position for tagging metadata.

Understandably asset management is a huge initiative for us. It has been a big adjustment from tape logs and time code window burns to Final Cut Server, but one that is welcome and needed. We're currently creating a keyword searchable system using FCS and look forward to all the gains a digital content workflow can bring to the team.

Miranda NVISION 128x128 router with dual NV9000 controllers. "When we moved to high-definition, we worked hard to reduce ambient noise. We extended everything with KVM cabling to get the CPU out of the room. The only things in each suite are a desk, a 30-inch Apple monitor, speakers, waveform/vectorscope, a keyboard and a mouse. Additionally, each suite has a software control panel for the router, so that any source or output is available in any suite with the press of a button."