Workflows Archives – Page 8 of 17 – The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: News in the New Norm

Posted on 12th May 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Whilst television marches on despite the pandemic, whilst not to overlook the decimated sports broadcasters, the mantra is ‘the show must go on’ so everyone has been trying to find ways to make TV production safe, practical yet still good! There is so many practical issues behind the camera from the typical packed OB trucks to simple bathroom sharing in the office which needs to be considered. In this video, we hear from BBC News explaining how they have managed to reshape their production to keep the news reaching the public.

“It’s hard to do your job in these circumstances.”
Morwen Williams

Morwen Williams, Head of UK News Operations at the BBC, describes the news workflows that have been created to make the news work. The term ‘Zoom workflow’ is in the fore, in the same way as a ‘Dropbox workflow’ has, perhaps forever, changed many file-based workflows, for live production a ‘Zoom workflow’ is the same. Though Morwen is quick to point out the work is as much technological as practical with the need for ‘long poles’ to ensure social distancing for sound engineers and the like. Workflows have had to remove roles, such as vision mixing, or move people to otherwise spare galleries.

Morwen explains that within the mobile journalism team, there was a pilot last year to test how well an iPhone X would be able to capture real packages which had some good results which ran on the national news. This is just one example of how the technological groundwork to enable mobile journalism during this crisis was already being laid.

Meeting virtually has its advantages, we hear, because when you have a lot of staff physical space is hard to acquire at the best of times. Since attendance can never be 100%, it’s better to have meetings more frequently to give people a better chance of attending some. Whilst this is certainly no replacement for physically meeting with people, it is likely to be retained when that is again possible.

Robin Pembrooke then takes some time to explain the shifts in production that he’s seen. All of the digital teams are now working from home. 15,000 people went from the offices to working from home which was a fraught transition but with no major outages. Radio shows are often now being presented and run by the presenter themselves from home. Talkback now takes many forms whether that be WhatsApp or other more broadcast-focused talkback-over-broadband products.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Morwen Williams Head of UK Operations, BBC News
	Robin Pembrooke Director, News Product and Systems, BBC News

Video: Working remotely in a crisis

Posted on 24th April 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

We’ve perhaps all seen the memes that the ‘digital transformation’ of a company is not because of ‘leadership vision’, adapting to the competition, but rather ‘Covid-19’. Whilst this is both trite yet often true, there is value in understanding what broadcast companies have done to deal with the pandemic virus and COVID-19.

Robert Ambrose introduces and talks to our guests to find out how their companies have changed to accommodate remote working. First to speak is Jack Edney of The Farm Group, a post production company. They looked closely at the communication needed within the organisation, managing priorities of tasks and maintaining safety and resources. Jack shows how the stark difference between pre- and during- lockdown workflows seeing how much they are now remote. Jack explains how engaged his technical teams have been in making this work very quickly.

Brian Leonard from IMG has done much the same as IMG have moved towards remote working as they have changed from 300 people on site to around 3 people on site and everything else remote. Brian talks about how they’d expanded into a local building in order to make life easier in the earlier days. He then considers the pros and cons of being reliant on a significant freelance staff – that being the option of using their pre-existing equipment at home. Finally we look at how their computer-based SimplyLive production software allows them the immediate ability to remotely produce video.

OWNZONES is up next with Rick Phelps who gives a real example of a customer’s workflow which was on-premise showing the before and after diagrams for when this moved remotely. These workflows were extended into the cloud by, say, using proxies and editing using an EDL, encoding and amending metadata all in the cloud. Rick suggests that this is both a short-term trend but suggests much will remain like this in the longer-term.

Finally, Johan Sundström from Yle in Finland takes to the stand to give a point of view from a public broadcaster. He explains how
they have created guest booths near their main entrance connected to the new channels so facilitate low-contact interviews. Plexiglass is being installed in control rooms and people are doing their own makeup. He also highlights some apps which allow for remote contribution of audio. They are also using software-based mixers like the Tricaster plus Skype TX to keep producers connected and involved in their programmes. The session concludes with a Q&A.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Jack Edney Operations Director, The Farm Group
	Johan Sundström Head of Technology Vision, Yle Finland
	Rick Phelps Chief Commercial Officer, OWNZONES
	Brian Leonard Head of Engineering: Post and Workflows IMG
	Robert Ambrose Managing Consultant, High Green Media

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

Posted on 7th January 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

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.

Watch now!
Speakers

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

Video: Simplifying the Media Workflow

Posted on 22nd November 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

IMF is an exchange format for exchanging media between companies. Wrapping up many different versions of a programme or film into one deliverable, this Interoperable Master Format promises to reduce storage costs, to simplify workflows and, of course, to allow any company to deliver to any other.

Niklas Hammarbäck from the Nordic Entertainment Group explains how they have moved their workflows over to IMF and the benefits that has brought. Niklas lays out the problems he was trying to solve – the main one being the many different delivery formats that must be ingested. These differences create complexity and inefficiencies. The talk examines the requirements that the group developed ahead of transforming their workflows; having a single common format, for example.

This leads in to IMF which Niklas compares to baking a cake. The IMF format contains ingredients and a recipe for creating the deliverable. The ingredients in IMF are the video, audio and metadata files and the recipes are also contained in the delivery. This method allows for a video to be delivered once with several audio files. The traditional alternative would be sending the same video four separate times just with different sound.

Niklas goes in to some detail about the contents of an IMF delivery including the CPL files which are the ‘recipes’ for the media ‘ingredients’ giving examples from https://cpl.fishtank.cloud.

The talk finishes with a summary of the benefits, a check against the requirements and what has been achieved and some questions from the audience.

Watch now!

Speakers