Harmonic Central Storage To Support Live Sports Production At New Salford Quays Site

Harmonic has announced that its Omneon MediaGrid active storage system is being integrated by BBC Sport into a new file-based production system designed to enable instant highlights creation and fast-turnaround edits.
The Omneon MediaGrid, which is being installed along with EVS live production systems at the broadcaster's new facility in Salford Quays, Greater Manchester, will provide central storage for up to 1,500 hours of HD content and support a fast edit-in-place workflow for the facility's Final Cut Pro editors.
Geoff Stedman, Senior Vice President for Corporate Marketing at Harmonic, said: "BBC has relied on Omneon server systems for more than a decade, and now with its shift to a faster and more agile file-based live sports production system, the company also has chosen to implement an Omneon storage solution.
"The Omneon MediaGrid storage system offers the high performance and resilience that are critical in live broadcast applications and we are confident it will provide the same performance for future sports broadcasts from Manchester."
Within BBC Sport's new live production workflow, sports events will be recorded onto EVS servers for logging and instant editing and also streamed to the Omneon MediaGrid via EVS XTAccess. The scalable system will be capable of supporting 36 simultaneous ingests. Up to 200 journalists and producers will be able to search and view a proxy version of footage using EVS IP Browse.
The Omneon MediaGrid system, providing aggregate bandwidth up to 6 Gbps and total usable storage capacity of 96 TB, will be connected directly to Final Cut Pro for creation of features and highlights packages, news-based packages, documentary-style content, and other edits in post-production. EVS Final Cut Pro plug-ins will facilitate search, import and export functions, ensuring that finished content is delivered to the appropriate EVS playout server. The entire production system is scheduled to go by live by the end of 2011.
(KMcA)