Douglas, Glad you are still big on FC. This one is fun to read, so I'm going to read it a few times. Moved from the CUBE/DIVI thread........which all of a sudden is no Dog anymore.......Motorola took out GIC this wk so the remaining players getting more attention.
CUBE consumer video codec is starting to appear in consumer products..........but back to FC...digital video goes very well with FC........
VSRs....................................
www2.digitalbroadcasting.com.
Storage Area Networks (SANs) and Video SAN Recorders (VSRs) -- The Missing Piece of the SAN for Broadcasters
9/15/99
For broadcasters, video SAN recorders (VSRs) complete the Storage Area Network (SAN) picture and provide a new model for the broadcast facility of the 21st century.
By Dimitri Chernyshov, Entertainment Marketing Manager, Shared Storage Business Unit, Mercury Computer Systems, Inc. (Chelmsford, MA).
Contents
One Big 'Video Bucket'
Solution Demanded Open Architecture
Results Reduce Time, Improve Production
How SANergy Works
Marrying the Video Server to the SAN
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The implementation of Storage Area Networks (SANs) at video facilities around the world has led to a need to bridge the "file-based" networking of SANs with the "video stream-based" networking of traditional video routing systems. To meet this need, a number of companies have created a new class of products called "video SAN recorders," or VSRs, that operate like normal VCRs but connect via fibre channel to shared storage across a SAN. For one such network, this new technology was a major time and money saver.
One Big 'Video Bucket' (Back to Top)
"Ideally, I wanted to have a huge bucket into which we could put every piece of video we ever shot, and then out of that would come everything we need to put on air," says Kent Gratteau, VP of broadcasting and engineering at Shop At Home Network. The Nashville-based shopping channel claims to be the country's fastest growing home shopping network, reaching over 53 million unique cable households every day through more than 200 affiliated TV, cable, DBS, and owned and operated stations.
Shop At Home airs about 200 products each day?each on the air for between a few seconds and a few minutes. "We used to have two cameras aimed at two product display tables. While one was on air, the other was being set up for the next shot," Kent said. "Typically we air many of the same products more than once so we'd be re-shooting them each time they were scheduled?pretty wasteful."
Solution Demanded Open Architecture (Back to Top)
Shop At Home turned to AF Associates (Northvale, NJ) for a complete video system upgrade.
"They asked us to come up with a video playback system that would allow them to shoot a product beauty shot just once, and then have the capability to air it as many times as they wanted," says Brian Lee of AF Associates
"We wanted the solution to include a generic video server system that used an open-architecture rather than proprietary formats," Lee continues. Vela Broadcast's (Salt Lake City) MPEG2 video server products fit the bill.
"Shop At Home installed two Vela Rapid Access multi-channel systems?each one with an MPEG-2 encoder channel and four playback channels, and both connected to a single 216-Gigabyte DataDirect Networks (Chatsworth, CA) disk array via a fibre channel-based SAN," says E. Scott Nix of Vela Broadcast.
"The arrays can store roughly 50 hours of MPEG-2 video at 8Mbps on that disk array, but with the SAN, they can capture two streams simultaneously while outputting up to 10 streams," Nix says. "The SAN not only gives them redundancy in the unlikely event of a failure, but also allows multiple channels to playback the same clips at the same time for their different output channels without creating multiple files."
"Shop At Home is using our MegaDrive EV1000 hardware-based RAID disk array," says David Bunker, DataDirect Network's director of OEM sales. "It has a Fibre Channel connection to each RapidAccess client which are both running SANergy software from Mercury Computer Systems. This configuration allows them to share the same files on the RAID at the same time."
Results Reduce Time, Improve Production (Back to Top)
Today, Shop At Home records an average of 50 new product beauty shots each day, one quarter of their previous production rate. With the Vela system, they can take more time to set up the lighting and product placement to ensure the best results. The SDI out-of-the-camera is routed into the Vela RapidAccess video server, recorded to disk, and stored in a database.
With the new system, Shop At Home shoots just one beauty shot for each product. Ten seconds of each is stored in the video file system. When they want to play it to air, they call it up via a clip number and just hit the play button. The clip can be looped to run indefinitely, and the shots also can be captured for their web site.
Shop At Home is on air 24 hours a day, broadcasting four program channels simultaneously?the main network feed, a digital feed to selected markets, and two transponders for their backyard dish customers.
"It's all coming off that same DataDirect RAID," Nix says. "The RapidAccess and SANergy software make it possible for them to handle all four channels at once with both redundancy and room to expand."
The bottom line for Kent at Shop At Home was "the price was right and it worked."
How SANergy Works (Back to Top)
Storage Area Networks (SANs) like the one Shop At Home is using to connect the RapidAccess with the RAID are usually built of fibre channel. With the addition of a SAN Operating System (SAN-O/S) such as SANergy, all the workstations connected to the SAN can read and write the same files on the same disks, at the same time.
A SAN with SANergy operates exactly like a regular Windows NT server-based local area network (LAN) using Ethernet. Client computers can run MacOS, SGI Irix, Sun's SPARC Solaris, or Windows NT platforms. Every client computer can see all the disks across the network if permitted to do so by the systems administrator, or just individual files or folders if that's all they need to see.
The only difference between a LAN and a SAN is that instead of the ethernet LAN trickling data to the clients at speeds much too slow for video work, the SAN provides data to all the clients at dozens of Megabytes per second. In most cases client computers connected to the SAN don't need any local video storage at all?the storage across the SAN is more than fast enough to provide the video that all the client computers need.Common FC do your stuff- Ethernet LAN trickling-love reading that part
"Since we use Windows NT as the operating system beneath RapidAccess, using off-the-shelf-storage Fibre Channel SAN equipment, and SANergy allowed us to concentrate on what we do best?MPEG-2 encoding and decoding hardware and the control software to interface to it," Nix says. "We use as many industry-standard, off-the-shelf parts as we can so we don't have to re-engineer everything. Ultimately we pass those savings on to customers and provide them with a less expensive total solution."
Marrying the Video Server to the SAN (Back to Top)
These devices that allow capture and playback of video to disk have historically been called "video servers," but when connected via a SAN to common storage, a more descriptive term for them is "video SAN recorders," or VSRs.
At NAB99, six different companies used off-the-shelf storage with SANergy to demonstrate VSRs including Vela Broadcast, Vibrint Technologies (Bedford, MA), Drastic Technologies (Toronto), Thomson Broadcast (Cergy-Pontoise, France), Videomedia (San Jose, CA), and Viewgraphics (Mountain View, CA).
Vibrint Technologies (Bedford, MA) manufactures MPEG2 VSRs with specific-purpose software for use in broadcast news production and airing.
"Our digital news production solution uses SANergy to provide multiple feed-recording and news-editing [VSRs] simultaneous access to centrally-stored media across a SAN," says Roland Boucher, VP of marketing for Vibrint Technologies. "Using Vibrint FeedClip, a news producer or journalist can review an incoming news feed and quickly mark selected clips.
"By using a SAN configured with SANergy, the clips are immediately available to multiple NewsEdit workstations even before they're completely on disk," Boucher continues. "This allows several editors to work on different aspects of the same story all at the same time. Additionally, playback of edited sequences can occur without transferring them to another system.
"In the race to make the 6 o'clock news," Boucher says, "shared storage can result in a distinct competitive advantage. It's also extremely cost-effective because it allows broadcasters to scale up the number of NewsEdit systems, without adding expensive redundant storage in each edit bay."
Part II will explore a long-held dream among broadcasters to connect NLE systems with VSRs to create the "tapeless facility."
Dimitri Chernysov is Entertainment Marketing Manager for the Shared Storage Business Unit for Mercury Computer Systems in Chelmsford, MA. He can be reached at dimitri@mc.com.
Nice to see how FC is moving into the real world of digital video and making a difference!
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