Turner Sports With Dalet MAM Makes IBC Awards Shortlist

Turner Sports Central has been shortlisted on the content management category of the IBC2012 Innovation Awards for its new, multisport asset management (MAM) system which logs, tracks, and retrieves more than 27,000 live recording hours of content from more than 6,000 individual events each year — around two million highlights captured each year. Dalet, a leading provider of MAM solutions for News, Sports, Programs, Archives, and Radio, provides the managerial MAM core for the new system with the Dalet Enterprise Edition MAM platform, which unifies workflow and metadata management across several different systems.
Turner Sports operates its Atlanta Sports Central production center 365 days a year to support its coverage of over 40 different sports and five national sports leagues, including the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the National Basketball Association (NBA), Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR), and the Professional Golfers Association of America (PGA), providing content that is used to feed live broadcasts, websites, mobile services, other multimedia platforms, and on-demand services in support of these partner leagues.
Dalet worked closely with Turner and multiple vendors to create a cohesive, streamlined workflow at Turner Sports Center with integrations that included the in-house “Feeds Request 24/7” system for scheduled recordings, EVS servers for centralized ingest and broadcast playout, Stainless Code for event logging, Apple Final Cut Pro for craft editing, and Active Storage, Quantum and NetApp for storage. The scale of the project is huge with a database that references 3,000 teams and 30,000 players, but the effort was accomplished from the specification stage through development and launch in only 15 months. Despite the huge throughput of the system — it is currently configured for 26 ingest and 16 playout channels — any content is available for logging, editing and viewing within 10 seconds.
“We congratulate Turner Sports on their selection as a finalist in the prestigious IBC Innovation Awards competition. Dalet is very pleased to have a leading role in this very successful project,” says Stephane Schlayen, COO, Dalet. “The breadth and depth of this effort across so many different live sports events offers a tremendous example of how best-of-breed technologies can be combined to produce a fully integrated solution that meets very complex sets of requirements. Turner Sports has created a sports production MAM that allows them to leverage the value of their content across multiple platforms on game day and well into the future, as assets can be easily searched, browsed, and retrieved for different purposes.”
While live broadcasts are in progress, Dalet is involved with multiple tasks that are simultaneously underway in the production center. Dalet initiates recordings to the SAN and immediately indexes these assets in Dalet, making them available to everyone who needs them, including Dalet users, loggers, craft editors, and EVS operators.
This project represents the first deployment of the Dalet MAM-EVS integration, which was announced last year. This integration allows the fluid exchange of content between systems. For instance, the EVS capability to convert high-resolution media into several different formats makes high-resolution media available to Final Cut Pro craft editors, and corresponding low-resolution media available to loggers and Dalet desktop editors at the same time — while the recording is still in progress. Practically, this means that a logger can log an action in low-resolution just seconds after the play takes place and both craft and desktop editors can bring that logged action into their edit timeline as soon as the logger has entered his log. In addition, selected clips in Dalet are visible via the EVS IP Director interface to enable collaborative work. A Dalet user can create a video clip in a predefined clip bin by using any of the Dalet tools while ensuring the preservation of the defined media from the EVS recording train. The Dalet hierarchy of Clip Bins follows EVS’ legacy structure of pages and banks to make it easier for EVS Playout Operators to access this new clip on the EVS LSM (Live Slow Motion) hardware control panel, or within EVS IP Director. For example, when a P.A. saves a clip in the Dalet Clip Bin “Page 2 \ Bank 3,” EVS Operators will immediately find it in EVS’ Page 2, Bank 3. Dalet monitors all the iterations of the same content across different storage units and maintains the reference to the unique asset.
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