NBC Olympics: Two Locations - One Production System

(08/02/2014) The Olympic Games in Sochi provide an example of the growth of at home efforts: A centralized production team like Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) does much of the camera and event production work, allowing the Rights Holding Broadcasters (RHBs) to concentrate on editing and building story packages. And more and more broadcasters even reduce their on-location staff by increasing the staff back at their home base, making best use of the data-pipelines which now are available from any international sports event location.

One example is NBC Olympics. Already at the 2008 Beijing Games, NBC Olympics has used the large fiber and data pipes to do much more than just backhaul content. The goal has been to give production personnel, no matter where they are located, access to the content they need when they need it and with true autonomy and all located on one media asset management system (MAM). This year, NBC has accomplished that goal: Not only are the two main production centers in Sochi and Stamford (the headquarter of NBC Sports in Connecticut) connected, but all the venue production teams in and around Sochi are as well.

Server and MAM technologies from Avid, EVS, and Harmonic play the key role in both Sochi and Stamford as the FileCatalyst file-transfer platform allows users to search for content within and then move files back and forth across the Atlantic.

The team in Stamford includes more than 300 staffers working on everything from logging to creating a number of programs. However one of the fascinating aspects of the system is that, when staffers in Sochi want to find a clip or piece of content, they find it courtesy of metadata input by a logger in Stamford, where events will be logged as they happen. The metadata from the host broadcast, Olympic Broadcaster Services (OBS), is married with the logger's metadata to provide a complete picture of what happened and what makes it worth using.

While OBS loggers in Sochi deliver the objective metadata, like when the race started, who is racing, and who has won, the NBC loggers in Stamford are adding subjective log notes. Nevertheless the production teams in Sochi are using 41 Avid editing systems and four EVS playback machines at the IBC and additional gear at the venues. And all can use the metadata to begin assembling content for air. About 288TB of Avid Media Grid storage and 85TB of EVS storage are on-site at NBC's IBC operations, and more than 5.5PB of archived material is in Stamford.

Avid

copyrighted by liveProduction.tv AVID TO PROVIDE ACCELERATED CONTENT CREATION AND MEDIA ASSET MANAGEMENT

In addition to Avid Interplay MAM, NBC Olympics facilities at the IBC is outfitted with Avid Media Composer and Symphony editing systems connected to an Avid ISIS 7000 with 384TB of shared storage system while the Olympic Venues are each equipped with a 64TB ISIS 5000, AirSpeed 5000, and Interplay Production systems with connectivity back to the IBC.

EVS

copyrighted by liveProduction.tv EVS TO PROVIDE LIVE PRODUCTION WORKFLOW

EVS has more than 70 XT series advanced media production servers in use for NBC Olympics coverage of the Games. Approximately 20 servers are used at the NBC Olympics central broadcast production facility at IBC, and another 30 are used at the NBC production center in Stamford. The remaining servers are deployed at numerous individual sporting venues in Sochi. In addition, approximately 50 workstations are implemented in various other locations, providing an integrated suite of video production management applications for complete ingest control, metadata management, on-the-fly editing capabilities, and playout scheduling. Together, the solutions allow the secure and streamlined ingest and management of vast amounts of content from the many sporting venues and the primary IBC broadcasting center for distribution around the globe.

Harmonic

copyrighted by liveProduction.tv HARMONIC FOR VIDEO INFRASTRUCTURE

NBC Olympics is using the Harmonic solution to support the highlights factory in which staff based at the broadcasters Stamford facility will very quickly access event footage captured in Russia, create highlights clips, and make them available to mobile devices and computers. This wide-area production model facilitates cost-effective content creation by allowing NBC Olympics to maintain a significant portion of its operation in the United States.

Harmonic MediaDeck video servers are recording as many as 25 incoming venue feeds as both XDCAM-HD at 50 Mbps and H.264 low-resolution proxy. These systems are giving Stamford personnel independent control over 60 channels of local ingest. Each recordings proxy is replicated in near real-time on a 480 TB storage system connected via two 10-Gigabit circuits to a second 384 TB MediaGrid installed at the Stamford facility. In less than a minute, content created on the Sochi MediaGrid system is replicated on the Stamford MediaGrid system.

The NBC Olympics production staff in the U.S. and Russia has direct access to content stored on either MediaGrid system through the MAM system, even if the event is still in progress and the files are still being received. Once recordings begin, dozens of loggers, producers, and editors in Stamford are accessing the material, excerpt what they need, and make highlight files. Using extensive live logs and stats, scoring, and timing information embedded as metadata, editors are able to make shot lists that can be quickly and automatically conformed in proxy resolution for streaming along with live multiscreen services, or conformed in high resolution for use in NBC Olympics traditional broadcast edit suites in Stamford.

Integration of the MediaGrid into NBCs EVS workflows, with devices directly mounted on the MediaGrid, are extending and pooling the storage capabilities of the EVS systems. From any IPD

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