Broadcast
The world of broadcasting is changing dramatically. From HD to mobile video, new formats and delivery methods must be addressed. At the same time, great value can be derived from re-using existing media assets. These same changes in delivery methods are driving the cost per incremental channel down as broadcasters fight for the attention of consumers who now have many other viewing options. One requirement that hasn't changed, though, is the need for bullet-proof reliability: programming and advertising must be delivered reliably for broadcasters to be able to make money. With its simple “plug and play” format expansion capabilities, unmatched expertise in file based workflows and world-renowned reliability, Omneon has made the transition to this new model simple and painless for hundreds of broadcasters around the world.
- Explore Related Workflows
- Content Repurposing
- Content Staging and Playout
- News and Sports Highlights
- Studio Production
- Video Post Production
Content Repurposing
The broadcast news workflow no longer ends with the newscast. To maximize their media presence and improve their bottom line, broadcasters are repurposing news and other content to multiple web and phone delivery platforms. Putting further pressure on the production, news segments are often posted online before they appear on-air. In these fast-paced broadcast environments, baseband video quality verification and transcoding processes are frequently too slow and too manually intensive.
By combining high-bandwidth storage and a high-performance multi-CPU grid architecture into one media storage and processing platform, Omneon presents a unique solution to today's repurposing workflow needs. The platform can perform many file-based quality verification processes simultaneously and transcode content many times faster than real time without burdening the house network or adding digital islands. Content is verified, transcoded and re-verified in place on the Omneon media and processing platform.
Content Quality Verification:
File-based content verification now allows broadcasters to automatically check for a broad range of video standards and quality attributes without incurring the time or potential errors of a manual process. A file stored in the Omneon platform can be automatically checked for blockiness, black or repeated frames, pixelation, oversaturation, and many more errors that can be introduced at almost any stage of content development.
Transcoding & Rewrapping:
Another outgrowth of web and phone delivery platforms is the need to transcode between video codecs or rewrap between media file formats to meet delivery network requirements. The Omneon ProXchange grid-powered transcoding engine handles these conversions automatically and far faster than alternative solutions that rely on separate appliances. That said, the Omneon platform is also compatible with virtually every brand of stand-alone transcoding solution with direct backplane integration that optimizes access to stored content and minimizes traffic on the house network.
Optimized WAN distribution:
The Omneon ProCast content delivery system accelerates, prioritizes, manages, and monitors WAN transfers. Fully integrated into the Omneon media storage and processing platform, ProCast uses either watch-folder or rules-based operations to insure the right content is delivered to the right destination when it's needed.
Content Staging and Playout
Taking completed program material, provisioning it appropriately for regionalized reception and delivering the finished product in either real time or as a file to the distribution point is the goal for any transmission operation. Changes in the marketplace are creating significant upheavals: the adoption of new formats dictates a change in the underlying infrastructure, and the market fragmentation caused by the proliferation of devices on which consumers may view material requires a reduction in cost per channel in order to remain viable. At times, adapting can seem overwhelming. As the world-leader in transmission server infrastructures, offering “plug and play” format expansion capabilities, unmatched expertise in file based workflows and world-renowned reliability, Omneon has made the transition to this new model simple, smooth and painless for companies around the world.
The transmission workflow can broadly be broken down into 3 sections: media ingest, media preparation, and media delivery. The workflow described here details all of these separate steps, and while these steps could take place in separate facilities, they are most often combined into a single facility within a business entity, as this simplifies the internal networks required to move a project from one phase to the next.
These activities will generally also involve some quality control/verification activities, but for clarity of description here, details of those QC steps have been omitted. More information on automated QC in an Omneon environment can be found on the site.
Material Ingest:
Traditionally, finished program material enters the workflow via satellite feed, land line, or in tape form via delivery truck or courier.
Working in conjunction with an automation system or record controller, the Omneon platform ingests the incoming material as a real-time stream. The flexibility of the Omneon platform allows facilities to compress the incoming material in the format of their choice, and browse copies of the ingested material are simultaneously created by the system for use later in the workflow. For “full resolution” material, DV/DVCPRO, Iframe and LongGOP Mpeg and XDCAM formats are supported in both SD and HD, and AVC-Intra and DNxHD are additionally supported for HD scenarios. All formats can coexist on the same server at the same time, offering facilities truly format independent operation. The flexibility of the Omneon architecture allows facilities to add new codec formats to the system as their business needs require.
In addition to the traditional methods for material acquisition, material is increasingly coming into the facility via file transfer. The Omneon platform supports all of the industry standard file transfer protocols natively, so material can be delivered to the ingest stage via standard IT technologies. Advanced features in the Omneon platform will report to the facility's business systems that a new clip has arrived on the file system, so that the business systems can integrate that information into their databases to show the material as present in the facility.
It is usual for ingested material to undergo some form of visual quality control at the end of this stage, and the Omneon platform fully supports that activity, through either proxy or full resolution viewing of the ingested material (and in some cases, file-based QC may also be implemented). Once through this stage, the material moves on to the media preparation stage
Material Preparation:
The purpose of this stage in the workflow is to check and modify the ingested material to ensure that it is formatted appropriately for the target audience. Examples of such adjustments might be to change program segment length to match local broadcast regulations, to add the necessary language track for the intended audience, to add closed-captioning and subtitles to the material, or to edit for content based on broadcast schedule.
The Omneon platform offers unique capabilities in material preparation. The platform supports a number of APIs which allow direct manipulation of content stored on the platform. Interacting with the material in this way offers huge savings in transfer time and network bandwidth, as material no longer needs to be transferred from the platform to the manipulating application server – the application can interact with the material in place on the Omneon platform instead.
Through the Omneon platform's unique capabilities, facilities can add audio channels to an existing video asset for multi-regional and SAP applications, directly on the storage. In this way, a single program asset can contain all of the languages that the asset needs to be broadcast in, which simplifies the archive of the asset later in the workflow. Applications can add or edit closed-captioning and subtitle information directly on the Omneon platform, and that process takes place at the text level, rather than by decoding and encoding the video externally. This higher-level interaction means that applications can simply pass a text file to the Omneon platform, and the platform itself will encode that into the appropriate video stream at many times faster than real time.
The flexibility of the design of the Omneon platform means that this media preparation stage can be performed on any of the platform's locations: on the ingest Spectrum or MediaDeck, on a MediaGrid which is being used as a staging server, or even on the playout Spectrum or MediaDeck – the facility has total flexibility to choose not only it's preferred media format, but also in the layout of it's workflow.
Material Playout:
Working in conjunction with an automation system or playout controller, the Omneon platform supports all major playout formats in both SD and HD, and can play them “back to back” seamlessly in any order. It will even up-convert SD clips to HD, so a single output channel can now handle all formats on a single timeline – with greater efficiency as clips no longer need to be transcoded and up/down converted to conform to the same standard prior to playout. This flexibility also extends to the management of audio tracks. The Omneon platform has the unique capability of automatically routing the correct language to the desired audio output based on the facility's business rules. Since this is handled automatically, there is no need for human intervention and the associated potential for error. Many large facilities rely on the efficiency and accuracy of the Omneon platform in their multi-language, multi-region transmission businesses—in some cases, up to 96 tracks per clip.
Typically, playout material is fed to a master control room, where a switcher and channel branding unit perform the final signal processing before material is sent to the point of distribution. This is a well known and tested solution, but the economies of the modern transmission business has led facilities to look for a more cost effective way of adding a complete channel playout solution to their existing infrastructure. For smaller facilities, the cost of the peripheral processing equipment required may make the additional channels too expensive to consider. For these transmission applications, the Omneon platform has been extended to include the MediaDeck GX. This playout system combines the industry's #1 playout server technology with best-of-breed channel branding and master control capabilities to offer the industry's first no-compromise complete channel playout solution. Designed to work with a facility's existing automation system, MediaDeck GX extends the Omneon platform's reach into transmission workflows, by collapsing the external processing into a single, self contained storage, playout and branding solution.
News and Sports Highlights
Stations and networks are looking to achieve both greater efficiency in producing news and sports and a greater capacity for distributing this content immediately to media consumers via the Web and mobile devices in addition to traditional broadcast channels. To succeed in this highly competitive world of broadcast production, journalists and editors require the best production tools the industry has to offer. They also need reliable and flexible ingest and production servers. The challenge is to offer timely news content to viewers over all relevant distribution platforms. To overcome this challenge, broadcasters need a platform that automates the movement of content through the news production workflow, makes media readily accessible to the entire production staff, and accelerates the repurposing of media for alternative devices.
The Omneon storage and processing platform is the platform of choice for best-of-breed news production and media management systems. These systems stand out on the Omneon platform because it integrates highly reliable ingest and playout with flexible and scalable production storage. In addition to supporting the widest range of video formats and craft editors, the robust Omneon platform supports seamless news production workflows of any size.
The platform's Web services application programming interface (API) allows news production software vendors to integrate their products with services within the Omneon platform. This integrated Web services API supports best-of-breed file-based workflows by easing third-party integration and providing unified content management capabilities across server and storage systems.
Studio Production
In complex, multi-camera studio production environments, the core technical requirements are the simultaneous and synchronous capture of the sources and the ability to edit that material as soon as possible in order to guarantee timely delivery of the final program. Given the live and spontaneous nature of the actual production, migrating to a file-based workflow has its challenges but can be well worth it in order to streamline the process and gain efficiency. With its wide support for production video formats and edit-in-place capabilities, the Omneon storage and processing platform can satisfy the capture and playout requirements along with a shared edit environment. This unbeatable combination allows customers to use Apple Final Cut Pro to access and edit segments of the show even while those segments are still being recorded – a tremendous improvement in efficiency.
Video Post Production
Broadcasters are battling cost and staffing challenges by adding Apple Final Cut Pro edit stations to their traditional Avid production environments. Journalists and program producers working with Final Cut Pro can streamline the process of getting news segments and programs to air. But even more critical to the overall efficiency of the production environment is a cohesive production storage strategy. Storage capacity and broadcast content must be easily shared.
The Omneon storage and processing platform provides centralized storage that can easily scale to meet the growing bandwidth and capacity requirements of mixed edit environments. And by supporting edit-in-place of all popular SD and HD compressed video formats, the platform also empowers editors to share content and leverage sequences between Apple and Avid edit systems. DVCPRO, IMX formats can be ingested into the platform in native QuickTime for immediate editing on Final Cut Pro. Also, XDCAM HD material ingested in MXF by the Omneon Spectrum media server can now be natively edited on Apple Final Cut Pro without rewrapping to QuickTime. All these formats can be converted and imported into the Avid environment. Alternatively, Apple and Avid ingest tools or third-party ingest devices can be deployed with the Omneon platform. Transcoding, transmission staging, and Web streaming applications integrate directly with the Omneon platform as central storage, further streamlining the storage topology.
