Smooth Sailing For Sunset+Vine With ASG Digital Archive

Atempo, an ASG Company and provider of cross-platform data protection and archiving solutions, has announced that sports production company Sunset+Vine deployed ASG Digital Archive (ADA), an advanced file archiving platform, to effectively manage and preserve High Definition (HD) coverage of sporting events.
Established in 1983, Sunset+Vine is the leading independent supplier of popular sports programmes to a portion of the biggest broadcasters in the UK. The company’s main UK production contracts include horse racing for the BBC (The Derby and The Grand National), NFL for Channel 4, Aviva Premiership Rugby for ESPN and UEFA Europa League football for Channel 5. More recently, Sunset+Vine signed a 2-year contract to produce a weekly magazine programme leading up to the 34th America’s Cup in 2013.
Tasked with recording HD footage from the America’s Cup World Series, consisting of 12 worldwide regattas leading up to the 34th America’s Cup, Sunset+Vine was faced with the challenge of managing and storing a growing amount of digital data. Over the 2-year contract, the team captured 30 hours of HD footage from each event, as well as ENG material shot specifically for the weekly magazine show.
Additionally, the team had archived and acquired footage from news agencies and teams from all over the world, making a total of up to 300TB of data, transcoded in various formats including HD ProRes 422 for editing and MP4 and AVC-Intra 100 for delivery.
In order to edit the live satellite feed and provide broadcasters with the footage they need quickly, Sunset+Vine has 100TB of primary storage on Tiger Technology’s metaSAN and a cloud storage solution from Limelight. However, taking into account the requirement to preserve HD footage for the long-term, the increasing costs for the cloud service and reduction in space and performance of the metaSAN, Tom Bucknall, technical manager at Sunset+Vine was faced with finding a file-archiving solution to manage the digital data more effectively. With help from Digital Garage, a specialist broadcast, post production, audio and education solutions provider, Sunset+Vine deployed ADA.
"ADA meets the needs of the America’s Cup project and allows us to centrally manage media files with ranging levels of access," said Bucknall. "The ability to seamlessly access archived files through CatDV will enable our production team to work with archived data directly. Digital data can be easily archived to tape for long-term storage and effortlessly retrieved when needed, providing significant cost savings and optimising our existing storage resources."
Using ADA’s storage management capabilities, Sunset+Vine has the ability to move America’s Cup footage once it has been edited, from the metaSAN to a 14TB Nearline Axus RAID storage device for temporary archiving and quick retrieval. Once the Nearline device reaches 10TB capacity, the oldest data is automatically migrated for long-term preservation to a low-cost Spectra® T120 LTO-5 tape library, making room for new data and optimising performance. ADA’s transparent integration with CatDV, Sunset+Vines’s media asset management solution, enables editors to seamlessly archive and retrieve their assets via CatDV’s user interface.
ADA also archives the specific and varying metadata recorded at each America’s Cup regatta as they take place, including the reel number, cameraman and date, allowing Sunset+Vine to easily search and quickly retrieve footage as requested.
"Broadcast and production companies like Sunset+Vine are faced with data-intensive environments, whereby media rich files are required to be safely stored for the long-term while remaining easily accessible for future use," said Hilarius Dressen, general manager for ASG EMEA. "ASG’s ADA is designed to simplify the data management process and easily integrate into project workflows. It addresses the growing demand for robust, feature-rich and fully-integrated digital content archiving solutions in the media and entertainment space."
www.atempo.com.