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Our Blogs Open Sauce linux.conf.au: The Beeb and the penguin
Our Blogs Open Sauce linux.conf.au: The Beeb and the penguin | linux.conf.au: The Beeb and the penguin |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Sunday, 27 January 2008 | |
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Page 4 of 6 Cunningham said he didn't know much about the iPlayer brouhaha. "...the iPlayer's been in development for a while and it was, for me, disappointing to see it only work on a particular version of Windows, with a particular version of IE. I only know about the iPlayer project from what I read in coverage like the Register and so on. It's a huge organisation and that's my source of information - the technical press."His talk at LCA will be about production automation. "The area we're looking at in the BBC is where productions are using tape-based systems which is a very time-intensive process. For example, in a typical television production you might have seven cameras. They're all capturing different parts of the scene at the same time and writing to tape - the tapes are about 40 minutes long. At the end of a day's shooting, you might have 50 tapes or more. And each of those has to be ingested in real time. That is, put it into a tape player, play it back, connect it to a computer of some kind in order to digitise. "You know it's on the digital video tape, in digital form. It still has to be played out and re-digitised as a file in the editing system. And that's a very tedious process. It's also error-prone... things can be mislabelled in the process. And we wanted to speed all that up, make it more efficient and also offer more creative opportunities in post production. If we can get the material in a digital form, as a file instantly, or as soon as the shots are finished, that offers many more opportunities in the creative process of post production. "So that's the scope of our work. That's what we're looking at right from what we call acquisition, where the video and the audio are captured from the studio, through to the point where they're placed on a file server, to be used by editing clients. Typically, once the material is on a file server, you'll have a number of editing clients, four or five different people - teams - who will be using that material, bringing it to the editors, making decisions, doing effects, then rendering out the finished work. And then it goes on to a few other steps like technical QA and editorial QA and then broadcast." Once this system of production automation is completed, rushes of the raw unedited pieces will be available much sooner. "On the news side of things, they already have a system in place, because the demands for it are so much higher and you really do need the material as a file instantly, so that you can broadcast it or edit it straight away, and, within minutes, put it to air. ...we're not trying to solve that; that's effectively been solved in news. There are a couple of little things which they might use our system for, like ingesting archive footage and getting a job into a file format." |
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