RTVE Updates 'Historic Archive' Production System With Medway

Spanish broadcaster, RTVE, has updated its 'Historic Archive' production system with Medway – a powerful and scalable media-centric middleware from Marquis Broadcast.

Medway links RTVE's edit platforms, asset management and video servers together with its historical archive systems. It helps connect multiple sites in different regions, to allow one site’s archive to be used from another site, all controlled via media asset management.

RTVE has two sites in Madrid and one in Barcelona, with a data-tape archive at each location and many Avid editing and production systems. Users can initiate a workflow from their Asset Management system that will restore content from an archive on one site for use in one of the other sites, where Medway transfers and ingests this into an Avid Interplay system. The different systems are kept deliberately isolated for security reasons, with the interconnections typically being managed through FTP. Also, once a project has finished, RTVE can push back out from Avid to any of the archives, making this a true ‘round trip’ archiving solution.

Designed to meet the demands of the most challenging production environments, Medway is used globally by broadcast, production, post production, newsrooms and playout facilities. It provides the most comprehensive and widely-used integrations to Avid and is a plug-and-play replacement for Avid Transfer manager, offering immediate cost, operational and performance benefits. At RTVE, Medway supports complex workflows, seamlessly integrating advanced metadata processing and exchange between the production and archive systems it connects.

Medway uses the world's largest library of certified workflow and metadata integrations. It enables clients and integrators to build out the precise workflows they need for their business, often including complex migrations from legacy production, transmission and DAM systems to new and contemporary systems. For RTVE, Medway delivers full integration between the Avid production system and the DAM and archive systems within its existing media production workflow, bringing the richest set of legacy and contemporary integrations with advanced UHD transcoding.

The technical team at Marquis Broadcast worked closely with RTVE and local service provider, Telefónica, for three months on this project, customising Medway to work seamlessly with the multi-site processing required. The setup for the production system involved complex metadata mapping and conversions, but one benefit of Medway is that it is very quick to customise fields without any real need for user involvement.

www.marquisbroadcast.com