[opendtv] Tapeless in an Educational Setting
- From: dan.grimes@xxxxxxxx
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2010 10:30:16 -0700
I was recently asked a series of questions regarding going tapeless in an
educational setting. I responded with the text below. Let me know if you
have comments or additional insights.
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|Re: Tapeless Question
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1. Why did you feel going tapeless was something to explore in an
educational setting?
Going tapeless is not necessarily about the setting, whether professional
or educational. Going tapeless is about the workflow. It allows some
important improvements on getting media from the field or studio into the
production environment quickly and accurately. Also, when working in the
production facility, it allows better collaboration and efficiency as to
where one works. By having the media files accessible by all in all
locations, there are certain barriers and tasks that are eliminated. And
with distribution outlets becoming more digital and diverse, the tapeless
workflow can eliminate some steps.
There is one good reason for bringing a tapeless workflow specifically into
an education setting. Mainly, the industry is already there and if
students are to learn how to work with that setting, the system must be
there to teach with.
2. Has the tapeless system begun to pay off in the sense that you save
money on tape?
No, tapeless is more expensive on all sides. Tape is cheap and maintenance
of tape-based systems is mainly in the long term. We used to spend roughly
$1500 for tape per year. A few lost or damaged media cards can eat the
savings up quick.
The tapeless equipment itself is more expensive (with the exception of a
card reader versus a VTR), the media (solid state cards or optical disks)
are much more expensive than tape (even when re-used hundreds of times),
and a very large infrastructure is required behind the operator systems.
For instance, local storage such as hard drives are very cheap. But to
centrally locate the files requires a large Storage Area Network. With
that comes all kinds of networking technologies, wiring, support personnel
and support contracts. Count on some high overhead.
But there are other monetary savings outside of the media. That is, there
are efficiencies in speed and improvements in quality. This is hard to
monetize in an educational environment. In a commercial environment, it is
imperative.
3.Was it ever a concern for your engineering staff whether they'd be able
to maintain the tapeless system?
Yes, and definitely a requirement. We added a Media Network Engineer to
compliment the Broadcast Engineering staff. Here at UNLV, that means just
two of us. For our two TV studios, radio station and four computer labs,
we realistically need 4 people:
1) Networking specialist
2) Lab supervisor and technician
3) Broadcast/Production Engineer
4) Bench Technician/Production Specialist
We do have some students working for us to help with the labs and
productions, but we need more. With the economic environment the way it
is, there isn't much hope of increasing our staff. We are having to
justify the two positions we do have.
And our engineering staff and faculty had to go through a lot of training,
not hours or weeks but months.
4. Why did you decide to go with Avid,
There are many systems out there. We went with Avid for a number of
reasons:
1) Avid is a leader in the media production environment for various
specialties including News production and episodic.
2) Avid offers products that integrate with each other, providing a very
integrated workflow.
3) The video quality of Avid codecs, in my opinion, are some of the best
available.
4) Our faculty and staff have been using Avid products for decades,
helping us transition and reducing the learning curve.
5) We have found Avid products to be very well tested and reliable,
helping us lower our maintenance budget.
6) They offer support to the level of which you are willing to pay.
did you investigate other options?
Absolutely.
We have a Final Cut Pro system here as well. It has some nice features and
competes very well with Avid Media Composer in its capabilities. But Apple
does not have the integration with a News Room Computer System (NRCS),
servers, SAN, CG, and a host of other required equipment. One would need
to look to multiple vendors.
We also considered Dalet. After our first proposal, their system was
proposed but the price tag was outside of our budget. Not that the Avid
system was cheap but Avid had most of the components in with their
proposal. Avid gives educators a great discount. Without that discount we
would not be able to afford Avid's software and hardware.
Naturally, being in Las Vegas, we attended demonstrations of many other
vendors at the NAB exhibition. This helped us rule out many of the
systems.
5. About how much did the equipment and installation cost?
The entire building with everything in it was $92M.
Our General Contract was $86M. This included all construction, data wiring
(which was about $800K) and lighting in the studios (about $1.4M).
The Instructional Technologies budget for a 200 seat auditorium/screening
theater (which also can become a third studio with a live audience for our
media productions), five computer labs, seven classrooms and three
conference rooms was $1.2M.
The Broadcast Facility, Furniture and Equipment (FF&E) budget was $8.6M.
This included some specialty systems and third party contract outside of
broadcasting but included a roughly $8M contract with AZCAR to design,
install and commission the TV and radio production systems.
6. How long from concept to approval to installation did it take to
complete the process?
The whole process of building the building took six years. In that time,
it took about two years to work with the university's administration to get
a contract with AZCAR. This involved a tremendous amount of work with some
very large documents just to get the contract. Once we contracted with
AZCAR, it took exactly one year to form the conceptual design, provide the
detailed design, purchase the equipment, install it, commission it, go
through all the operational training, and set the facility up to our
operational needs.
How did you persuade administrators the initial cost was worth it?
We didn't. In fact, all along the way we had to keep pushing them. The
way we got our new building and media production facility was by having a
benefactor, the Greenspun Family, donated nearly $37M (1/3) to the project.
In fact, originally the family only agreed to donate $16M but as the
university increased the scope of the building, the Greenspun family added
to the pot with the promise from the university that there would be two
High-Definition digital television production studios. In the end, the
university allocated $8.6M to the production spaces which only allowed us
one TV studio plus the radio studios, which probably sounds like a lot, but
there were requirements for very high quality levels.
We are now experiencing the problem of maintaining the facility. Not only
does the administration need to buy into both the initial cost but also the
operational and maintenance cost.
7. What benefits have you already experienced from going tapeless?
The biggest benefit is being able to go to any workstation and work on your
production. It is all centrally located and it is just a matter of logging
onto workstation. Production can happen in the Newsroom, Computer Lab,
Post Production Suite or office.
By keeping a single codec and resolution, media easily flows from one
application to another, so long as all applications can use the codec. In
reality, we have not been able to do this for all production applications.
But for the pure News production environment, it works very well.
8. Has there been any downside?
There are a tremendous number of downsides:
1) Ingest and output to tape when going from system to system is time
consuming but almost 100% compatible. The only time there is a problem is
if the tapes are tracking incorrectly which is a function of proper
maintenance. However, with files, there are so many different wrappers and
codecs, and even variables within each, it is very difficult to get
conformity and universal access.
2) While tapeless promises an easier QC process, this is not necessarily
realized. Different color spaces and conversions between them rarely
maintain qualities. The new file when transferred must still be QC'd at
every step, if not only for proper use at the target device.
3) In the past, dedicated hardware rarely failed and was rarely "buggy".
However, when dealing with an application running on an operational system
within non-dedicated hardware (read: PC, Mac), one will rarely find
stability and reliability. One minute everything is fine and the next it
gives only errors. A re-start of the application, a re-boot of the
computer, re-logging in, etc. are all maintenance procedures that operators
must regularly employ to continue working.
4) The physical field media has some shortcomings. The media is expensive
($500-1000 for solid state, $100 for optical) and the operators do not
respect the cost. They treat them like cheap CF or SD cards. They can
also be finicky from device to device. A card or disk might work in one
device (such as the camera) but not in another (such as the reader). For
instance, there are a number of XDCAM readers, but only certain XDCAM disks
in certain formats will work in each of them. And one must re-format the
media if any changes are made to the recording type (such as between
XDCAM-ex 35MB/s and XDCAM HD422 50Mb/s, or between 1080i and 720P).
5) The operators must be much more highly trained. This equipment is not
easy to operate. Things must be formatted just so and there are a bunch of
logins and settings to deal with.
6) Organization in a tapeless world is much more difficult. While
organizing tapes and keeping logs of tapes can be somewhat simple (though
time consuming), keeping track of digital assets can be very difficult.
With proper organization, media in a tapeless environment can be accessible
and findable. But if assets aren't renamed and meta-data not entered, if
settings are not checked to make sure one knows where the asset is going,
or if settings for transcodes or file manipulation is not monitored, the
asset can be lost for good.
7) It can very difficult to manage the storage space. I wish I could go
into this deeper but there are so many issues to deal with I could write a
book.
8) There is a steep learning curve when going from tape to tapeless.
Nothing is the same.
10) I could go on, but I need to stop somewhere...
In conclusion, one only goes to a tapeless format for necessity. This is
where the industry is going and this is where the educational settings must
go, too. When done right, the video quality and production speed can be
much better than in a tape-based facility. However, be prepared for a lot
of negatives including cost and overhead.
-Dan Grimes
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