Avid Interplay Hits the Olympic Trail

NBC Olympics will be supporting coverage of the 2012 Olympic Games in London with an Avid
workflow employing the Interplay Media Asset Management system serving with third party vendors, SONY and Harmonic.

NBC Olympics division’s broadcast facility will house employees responsible for delivering 17 consecutive days of Olympic coverage 27 July through 12 August 2012. With SONY and Harmonic, the Interplay MAM system will be used to create two simultaneous feeds for use in London and at NBC’s Olympics division’s headquarters in New York City. MAM on the Start Line Avid Interplay media asset management systems help automate broadcast workflows, optimize output and unify production. Teams can use it to track assets and customize workflows, and have tools for browsing, logging, review and approval, editing and archiving, plus transparent background media services. The 2012 London Olympics marks the sixth consecutive Games that NBC Olympics and Avid have worked on together. “Ingesting media and metadata directly into Interplay MAM early in the process allows us to make assets immediately available for video production in London and, at the same time, to the team at 30 Rock and other users,” said Darryl Jefferson, director, Post Production Operations, NBC Olympics. “In NY, teams need to access the same media and metadata to create their packages to the web instantaneously. Having media asset management as a hub is an important component to making this happen.” All of the video content’s metadata, including all athletic content, will be ingested directly from SONY’s XDCam Station into Interplay and then replicated from London to New York using Harmonic’s MediaGrid and ProCast storage and transcoding systems. NBC Olympics will use MediaGrid and ProCast to process and deliver the content quickly within the NBC Olympics Highlights Factory, the file-based environment used to support content creation for NBCOlympics.com, mobile platform distribution, and IPTV and VOD services. London to New York In New York, media coming from Interplay will be used by more than 40 users to create highlights for web distribution. London-based users and editors will get immediate access to Olympic footage, which can then be transferred from the Interplay system to Avid’s ISIS shared storage for use in simultaneous multiple-user production across multiple networks and news feeds. HD nonlinear editing suites in London’s International Broadcast Centre are outfitted with seven Avid Symphony and 26 Media Composer systems for editing and 5.1 surround sound. The systems will be connected to the ISIS storage and Interplay MAM systems. Users will be able to quickly browse the Interplay MAM proxy and transfer material faster than real-time to use in Symphony and start work in Media Composer. AirSpeed 5000 is used in conjunction with ISIS 7000 to set up turnkey production at the Olympic venues, including gymnastics, track and field, swimming and diving. Avid Interplay - Dynamic Media Tracking Among Interplay’s main aspects are dynamic media tracking and metadata handling designed to cover the entire media lifecycle. The user tools are lightweight, web-based tools made for various contributors, such as producers, assistants, loggers, journalists and librarians, who need to find, browse, pre-visualize, review, annotate, shot-list and edit content. Media access, edit and transfer are universal so that users can generate material and collaborate in real-time from anywhere, link to multiple sites, independently produce projects and upload full resolution media from a laptop. Interplay workflows automating non-creative tasks can be designed to interoperate with over 100 different vendors’ systems. The Interplay MAM is also deeply integrated with Avid editing software and project structure to synchronise teams and allow producers, assistants and loggers to do more pre-editing. Web Services Integration Interplay can be divided into separate modules, each supplied with applications, integration options and services addressing different business requirements.  Pre-defined web services integrations with Avid or third party systems may be grouped into modules from capture and ingest through production into archive and distribution. Ingest and QA management, for example, may be automated with centralized media scheduling and capture from tape, file, camera and devices, with quality control and metadata extraction. Global content is located and shared with automated transfers, managed storage and centralized workflows. Real-time production asset management, with project tracking and workgroup collaboration, includes editor integration, web-based browsing, review and approval, shot listing and logging tools For web-based search, browse and basic editing, a central archive has cataloguing tools and automated file import. Users can organise distribution to multiple platforms, channels, or formats in Interplay, which involves transcode, packaging and linkage to rights management, content management and analytics. Alternatively, distributed production can be achieved through real-time proxy access to a central library, remote editing and transparent uploading of full-res and proxy media from the editor.

User-Specific Focussed mainly on broadcast applications, Interplay can be tailored for specific news, sports, TV and video post-production segments. In the news area, Interplay’s real-time newsroom and media access will allow news producers to create and rapidly distribute stories, upload packages from the field, and publish to all channels with automated multi-platform distribution. For sports, Interplay has media management ability to create exciting fan experiences, grow franchise brands, and generate incremental revenue by keeping assets accessible to quickly repurpose, develop of in-game entertainment, and produce special features. In TV, remote teams can use the intelligent media production and management to collaborate in real-time, automate their non-creative tasks, or run projects in parallel. Avid has also developed modules centring on Interplay’s principle functions. The Interplay Media Asset Manager is scalable asset management with user tools and third party interoperation for workflow design. Interplay Sphere has bi-directional connectivity enabling editing and complete workgroup access from any location. Interplay Production comprises real-time management, tracking and user tools for creating content, tightly integrated with Avid editing, storage and server systems. Interplay Central is for web and mobile media browsing, with logging, basic editing and news reporting tools for assistants, journalists, producers and media librarians. www.nbcolympics.com  www.avid.com