Video: Real-Time Remote Production For The FIFA Women’s World Cup

We hear about so many new and improved cloud products and solutions to improve production that, once in a while, you really just need to step back and hear how people have put them together. This session is just that, a look at the whole post production workflow for FOX Sports’ production of the Women’s World Cup.

This panel from the Live Streaming Summit at Streaming Media West is led by FOX Sports’ Director of Post Production, Brandon Potter as he talks through the event with three of his key vendors, IBM Aspera, Telestream and Levels Beyond.

Brandon starts by explaining that this production stood on the back of the work they did with the Men’s World Cup in Russia, both having SDI delivery of media in PAL at the IBC. For this event, all the edit crew was in LA which created problems with some fixed frame-rate products still in use in the US facility.

Data transfer, naturally is the underpinning of any event like this with a total of a petabyte of data being created. Network connectivity for international events is always tricky. With so many miles of cable whether on land or under the sea, there is a very high chance of the fibre being cut. At the very least, the data can be switched to take a different path an in that moment, there will be data loss. All of this means that you can’t assume the type of data loss, it could be seconds, minutes or hours. On top of creating, and affording, redundant data circuits, the time needed for transfer of all the data needs to be considered and managed.

Ensuring complete transfer of files in a timely fashion drove the production to auto archive of all content in real time into Amazon S3 in order to avoid long post-match ingest times of multiple hours, “every bit of high-res content was uploaded.” stated Michael Flathers, CTO of IBM Aspera.

Dave Norman, from Telestream explains how the live workflows stayed on-prem with the high-performance media and encoders and then, “as the match ended, we would then transition…into AWS”. In the cloud, the HLS proxies would then being rendered into a single mp4 proxy editing files.

David Gonzales explains the benefits of the full API integrations they chose to build their multi-vendor solution around, rather than simple watch-folders. For all platforms to know where the errors were was very valuable and was particularly useful for the remote users to know in detail where their files were. This reduces the number of times they would need to ask someone for help and meant that when they did need to ask, they had a good amount of detail to specify what the problem was.

The talk comes to a close with a broad analysis of the different ways that files were moved and cached in order to optimise the workflow. There were a mix of TCP-style workflows and Aspera’s UDP-based transfer technology. Worth noting, also, that HLS manifests needed to be carefully created to only reference chunks that had been transferred, rather than simply any that had been created. Use of live creation of clips from growing files was also an important tool, the in- and out-points being created by viewing a low-latency proxy stream then the final file being clipped from the growing file in France and delivered within minutes to LA.

Overall, this case study gives a good feel for the problems and good practices which go hand in hand with multi-day events with international connectivity and shows that large-scale productions can successfully, and quickly, provide full access to all media to their production teams to maximise the material available for creative uses.

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Speakers

Mike Flathers Mike Flathers
CTO,
IBM Aspera
Brandon Potter Brandon Potter
Director of Post Production,
FOX Sports
Dave Norman Dave Norman
Principal Sales Engineer,
Telestream
Daniel Gonzales Daniel Gonzales
Senior Solutions Architect,
Levels Beyond

Video: Edit Intelligence In Production Pipelines

Netflix has famously moved in to original content but less-known are its innovations behind the scenes in production workflows.

Eric Reinecke looks at the challenges in moving media and finding ways to correctly pick and choose the right media to move. He looks at the different ways of moving editorial data: the venerable EDL, Avid’s more recent AAF and Final Cut’s XML talking about the pros and cons of them all.

The talk then moves on to OpenTimelineIO which is an API and interchange format for editorial cut information which was designed to help departments in animation studios to work together. Hosted by Pixar, companies like Netflix are finding uses for the API outside of animation and Eric shows demos of how he’s using it within Netflix then ends with a call to get involved!
 

Watch now!


 
Speaker

Eric Reinecke Eric Reinecke
Senior Software Engineer, Video Engineering
Netflix

Video: Blockchain & the Hollywood Supply Chain

At The Broadcast Knowledge, we’re continuing to cut through the hype and get to the bottom of blockchain. Now part of the NAB drinking game along with words like AI and 5G, it’s similarly not going away. The principle of blockchain is useful – just not useful everywhere.

So what can broadcasters do with Blockchain, and – given this is a SMPTE talk – what can film studios do with it? It’s doubtless that blockchain really makes secure, trusted systems possible so the mind immediately jumps to using it to ensure all the files needed to create films are distributed securely and with an audit trail.

Here, Steve Wong looks at this but explores the new possibilities this creates. He starts with the basics on what blockchain is and how it works, but soon moves in to how this could work for Hollywood explaining what could exist and what already does.

Speaker

Steve Wong Steve Wong
Cloud & Platform Services General Manager, Telecom, Media & Technology
DXC Technology

Webinar: Amp up your Company’s Video Production Plan

Webinar: 17th January | 18:00 GMT, 10am PST, 1PM EST

The video team at Brightcove knows a thing or two about producing high-quality, revenue-generating video campaigns. As a valuable resource for customers, the team is often answering questions, such as, “How to get started with video planning,” “When to outsource video projects,” or “Which stakeholders to involve.”

Join them live on 1/17 @ 1pm EST where James, Shaun, and Jason will take their spots in front of the camera to share production best practices that will help you tackle your next video project. You’ll walk away with recipes for their process, with topics on:

[Pre-Production] Steps to Set up for Success
[Production] Sound, Lights, Camera, Action!
[Post-Production] Finalizing Your Vision

Register Now