Canal Sur TV, one of the most ambitious multi-venue digitalizations

The Andalusian public broadcaster is carrying out in recent months an ambitious digitization project that has resulted in the total interconnection of its headquarters in Seville with seven of the provincial delegations that were not yet in network. Greater flexibility and agility in the workflow, the possibility of working from any provincial delegation together with the central newsroom in Seville as if it were a single one, the total absence of tapes throughout the process and the increase in the number of production hours are the main advantages that Canal Sur will take advantage of as a result of this digitalization. Both in intake and storage, editing, playout, documentation and archiving, this installation is already considered as a worldwide reference for the total integration of systems from different manufacturers.

In the production center of Canal Sur at its headquarters in Seville, an advanced ingestion system has been implemented that speeds up the entry of material from ENGs and other sources of contribution. All these signals are channeled from a 64×64 array in SDI video (with embedded audio) to 16 Avid Airspeed with 17 hours of capacity. Two Capture Manager servers manage the SQL base along with three client workstations for ingest management. From two other servers, both the array and the ingest ports and correspondent access via FTP are controlled. Four MPEG-2 encoders and one Proencode Agility Anystream (licensed for MXF, WM, Flash, RM) perform the encoding of all material.

Storage

As for storage, Canal Sur has installed in Seville for its information services an Avid ISIS with four 8TB cabins (32 TB, 16 TB in mirror) that provide service for 1,200 hours at 25 Mbps. The management of all this material is carried out by Avid ISIS System Director and Transfer Manger servers.

In total, the RTVA has 107 ISIS access licenses for MM, TM, DMS, Air Speed, MB, CM, NC, MC and Instinct.

For the program area, there are ten licenses that give access to Unity for FM, TM and MC, having a cabin with a capacity of 3.5 TB (RAID 5). A File Manager server and an Avid Transfer Manager allow you to perform ingest and playback transfers. Ingest and playback transfers are different from standard file transfers in that they first convert a stream to or from a set of video frames and audio samples that are then transferred over an IP network.

Editorial staff

Three redundant Avid iNews servers, two Data Receiver servers (for four agencies) and 190 concurrent access iNews stations constitute the digital newsroom of Canal Sur from the point of view of the creation of the texts. The heart of this newsroom is the Avid Interplay Server along with four Media Indexer servers. In total, RTVA has acquired from Avid 80 licenses for Instict, 40 for Assist and 20 for Interplay Editor. Along with these positions, the edition has been reinforced with 8 Avid News Cutter XP and 16 Media Composer Adrenaline for high-level editions, with eight rooms allocated to news and as many to programs.

The studio playout is carried out from four Avid Airspeed with 72 hours of capacity (one per studio plus one of shipments), together with an Avid Control Air Server and three Control Air clients (one per study).

In terms of documentation and archiving, the advanced Tarsys system developed by Tedial and installed in 110 positions (thirty in documentation and 80 in writing) allows you to manage concurrent access to all material.

This system ensures that any content, wherever it is stored, can be consulted by users as a single file. In combination with intelligent tape management, it makes the concept of almost online archiving indifferent since users can treat the contents of the tape as an accessible part of the warehouse, being transparent for it the location of the same.

In turn, the content that is in the file system, is indexed in the ingest generating a proxy copy in low resolution being able to perform any work on this low resolution proxy copy thus minimizing network transfers. In this way, only those parts of the file in high quality that are necessary will be recovered, thus maximizing productivity.

The content query has advanced search capabilities such as thesauri, allowing the creation of the same and the incorporation or import of other thesauri already existing in Canal Sur.

In this installation, two Tarsys servers control the Oracle base, while three AST servers allow library control for 6 drives managing up to 260 TB. This Tedial solution solves the problem of automating the transfer of data between the disk and the robotic tape library since it is able to virtualize the storage on disk and in the tape library thus allowing the content of the library to be online. AST allows the partial recovery of media files and intelligent disk management as a cache, optimizing access to the library.

The storage area is completed by four WM9 transcoders, a lowres server, two Oracle Process Manager servers, a Scalar i2000 library, with 6 LTO-3 drives and license for 700 slots, two redundant Stornext servers and a cache system with 4 arrays with a total capacity of 14 TB in RAID 5.

Provincial delegations

In seven provincial delegations, which were not yet integrated into the RTVA's centralized media management system, a complete digitalization of the entire workflow has also been carried out.

In each of these delegations, a Quartz matrix with embedded audio (16×16) and four Avid Airspeed with 17 hours capacity have been integrated for the ingestion of material. A Capture Maher (SQL) server and another for matrix control and VTRs support this scheme. For each delegation, a Capture Manager (client) position and an MPEG-2 codec have also been integrated.

In storage, Canal Sur has opted for its provincial delegations for an Avid ISIS with an 8 TB cabin (4 TB in mirror) with capacity for up to 300 hours at 25 Mbps and management based on ISIS System Director and Transfer Manager.

The heart of each of these newsrooms is based on an Avid Interplay server and two Media Indexers. RtVA has acquired ten Instinct licenses, five Assist and ten Interplay Editor licenses from Avid for delegation.

Except for the delegations of Malaga and Granada (which have fifteen), each has a dozen Avid Instinct for editing, three Assist, a NewsCutter XP and three Media Composer Adrenaline.

The playout is carried out by two Avid Airspeed with 72 hours of capacity, a server and a Control Air client.

For its delegations, as in the headquarters of Seville, Canal Sur has relied on the robustness and flexibility of Tedial's Tarsys system, implementing five simultaneous access licenses installed in eleven positions in each delegation (one for documentation and ten for writing). In the case of Malaga and Granada, they have been expanded to 17 positions (two in documentation). The management of the library and bases of each delegation is very similar to that integrated in Seville with a Tarsys server of BD (Oracle) and an AST for library control for two drives and license for management of 20 TB. They complete each delegation, in terms of storage, WM9 transcoders, a Stornext server (main and cache) and a Scalar i2000 library with 2 LTO-3 drives and license for 46 slots.