Page 28 - AIB | The Chanel | Issue 1 2012

With its seven TV channels and six
radio stations spread across Spain,
news represents one of Radio
Television Espana’s main pillars.
The company’s Canal 24 Horas (24/7
news channel), Teledeporte (sports
channel) and telediarios (daily news
bulletins) have generated leading
audience market shares over the
last few years.
Because of this growing consumer
thirst for quality programming,
RTVE has seen substantial increases
in the volume of content created by
its channels. And this was the
catalyst to exploratory investigations
to invest in an enterprise‐wide
media asset management system.
No mean feat, as it had to meet
RTVE’s stringent requirements of
storing hundreds of thousands of
hours of footage but also be
sufficiently flexible and reliable to
provide media access from
multiple locations.
THEBRIEF
RTVE’s overall objective was clear:
to implement a file‐based workflow
capable of increasing the flexibility,
speed, productivity and quality of
their entire news production
system. After evaluating a wide
range of offerings on the market,
RTVE decided the answer to their
challenging brief was an end‐to‐
end Avid workflow. Not only did it
meet all their requirements from a
technology point of view but they
also had the peace of mind of
knowing that they would be fully
supported before, during and after
the installation with onsite training
from Avid Professional Services.
With the concepts and designs
for the digital workflow in place,
work began. The plan: to eliminate
the daily use of video tape, bring
the group fully into the world of
file‐based workflow, speed up and
improve the quality of production,
and generally make it a slicker,
more professional operation.
To meet the tough challenge of
implementing a MAM solution
across diverse environments and
locations, while at the same time
incorporating remote access, media
sharing and transfer facilities, a
close working partnership was
essential. We recommended Avid’s
asset management solution,
Interplay, sit at the heart of the
integrated news workflow. The
other key components making up
the end‐to‐end news solution were
Avid ISIS 7000 shared storage,
AirSpeed Multi Stream servers,
InterplayAssist, NewsCutter, iNEWS
Instinct and iNEWS Command.
THEROLLOUT
As with any large‐scale project, we
approached the project one step at
a time. The master control centre at
Torrespaña was the first site to go
entirely file‐based, and after that
success, RTVE asked us to follow
up with similar projects in its
Mérida, Las Palmas and Sant Cugat
Del Vallés (Barcelona) facilities.
Each of these sites included an Avid
ISIS 7000 shared storage system
and Avid Interplay production
asset management system for
ingest, archiving, coding,
transcoding and transfer.
The creation of news bulletins is
a fundamental function in RTVE,
and we helped to advise them on
the best tools to get their bulletins
to air quickly and efficiently. Avid
iNEWS Instinct was picked as the
journalist’s tool primarily because it
allows them to work with text,
video and audio in one application.
And to help all contributors find
the right clips and accelerate the
editorial process, Avid Interplay
Assist was chosen as it allows them
to add locators, comments,
annotations and personalised notes.
To support the key journalist
iNEWS Instinct editing stations,
Avid NewsCutter craft‐editing
systems were installed to ensure
the visual quality of stories before
playout.
For master ingest and playout,
RTVE contributors put in Avid
AirSpeed MultiStream servers. And
for regional centres, playout of
daily news programmes is handled
by Avid iNEWS Command with its
dynamic playlist management.
THERESULTS
With the end‐to‐end Avid workflow
in place, RTVE can now connect its
seven regional production centres.
The new production infrastructure
has enabled staff across all areas of
the news production chain to access
content. This brings many benefits.
It enables contributors to edit the
most recently acquired video at
their own workstations while the
same material is made available
across the rest of the organisation.
It allows locally stored content to
be accessed from any production
centre. It makes online media at
Torrespaña, the heart of the RTVE
network in Madrid, available to
regional centres. And it establishes
a protocol to access legacy content
(deep historical archive), which
currently stands at about 250,000
hours.
Currently, the number of
workstations with simultaneous
access to online material at the
Torrespaña centre exceeds 300
licences. The spectrum of Avid
solutions installed as part of the
digitisation project now allows any
professional to access a wealth of
media from a single workstation ‐
using advanced browsing and
editing tools in a shared
environment. This has truly
revolutionised the way RTVE
employees access, manage and
share their content, and the
company is now beginning to reap
the rewards of a full‐scale file‐based
news operation. ■
Access to
legacy
assets
has been
optimised
“
”
www.avid.com
28 | ISSUE 1 2012 | THE CHANNEL
Simon Hayward,
Regional Sales
Director Northern &
Southern Europe,
explains how Avid
solutions
revolutionised news
production in Spain's
largest and most
influential multimedia
group RTVE
FILE-BASED
NEWS