TOKYO OLYMPIC GAMES: NBC
Darryl Jefferson and Jim Miles on NBC Olympics’ File-Based Workflows, Storytelling
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very NBC Olympic effort sees massive changes and advances with respect to file-based workflows, editing, and more. Toss in UHD, HDR, and immersive audio, and those advances are even more challenging and, ultimately, impressive. Darryl Jefferson, NBC Olympics, VP, broadcast operations and technology, and Jim Miles, NBC Olympics, director, digital workflow systems, discussed the multiple-continent, -time zone, and -facility effort with SVG.
Darryl Jefferson (left) and Jim Miles and the team worked hard to allow creatives to focus on storytelling during the Olympic Games.
Can you describe the ecosystem here? Miles: It’s Avid Media Composer for craft editing, and Avid Interplay MAM is the record apparatus for highlight-shot selection as well as our archive. The entire Olympic archive is Interplay and Media Central, and our playback turnaround is EVS. We do a lot with Telestream for transcode, flipping, and orchestration, and we use Signiant as our file mover and for transfers from the venues and to Stamford. Jefferson: We also have a new ingest device from Telestream called Live Capture, which can capture to 1080p HDR content as well as the older flavors of content. And our big monster storage is Dell/EMC Isilon. Miles: The interesting story on the editors is that we are still using hard workstations for the primary craft edits but all our auxiliary edits
You have teams around the world diving into your file-based workflows. Are the workflows the same everywhere? Miles: More or less. We try to put the high-resolution recording where it’s needed. If somebody is doing a turnaround at a venue, we’ll put it right there next to them in their local storage. If something is needed for primetime, we can move the content here to the IBC. But our main record apparatus has moved back to Stamford, and the hundred feeds that are coming in from different venues, from the host, and from our own all go back to Stamford and are recorded there, where the bulk of our ancillary users are. Then there are other business units in Miami, in the news organization at 30 Rock that are pulling from that recording wall in Stamford.
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are virtual machines. We used to have to bring 30 Avids to the IBC, but, this year, we had to bring only a dozen, and we have the VMs for the producers and those lighter-weight tasks. That has been huge for us in terms of the complexity of what we must build.