Mexico Goes to China - Part 1 of 2

I wrote two articles for the Final Cut Pro Supermeet at NAB this year. Here's part one of the first article looking at an Apple SAN network system that is being used at the Beijing Olympics this summer in China:

Last NAB, we visited Simplemente, a production/post-production house and Apple Authorized Training Center/Dealer based in Mexico City. They’ve been working hard alongside one of their biggest clients, Televisa, the world’s largest Latin American broadcaster. This year Simplemente embarked on its most ambitious project yet, a complete post-production solution for Televisa’s coverage of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China.

Televisa’s prior Olympic coverage consisted of lots of VTRs, tape-to-tape and non-linear editing stations and a lot of notebook paper. There was no one single system controlling everything. This year they were determined to modernize their methods. “We were approached to propose a system for the broadcast workflow,” says Rune Hansen, Simplemente’s Chief Technology Officer. “We would need to cover the entire workflow: from multi-channel ingest, low resolution browse/editing proxies, database with metadata, integration with Final Cut Pro for editorial, live playout to air and eventually integration with a tape library backup system.”

“Everything started with a call from Max Arteaga, Televisa’s VP of operations and Elias Rodriguez, director of technical operations,” says Simplemente’s CEO (and Final Cut Pro Tequila Supermeet donor) Monica Reina. “They asked us if Apple had something ready for sports coverage. They were very happy with the Xsan we delivered and they wanted to explore more solutions with us. So we started doing some research and got a lot of help from Apple’s Adam Green. It’s been challenging because Televisa wanted the first stage of the project to be ready by mid-January. We only had from the end of November to make it happen. It was pretty tricky to put all that together, especially right at the end of the year.”

The technical stats Simplemente had to contend with proved especially daunting. The solution needed to handle 22 simultaneous ingest channels of live footage and nearly 50 Final Cut Pro editing workstations, mixed between offline-quality proxy editing and online. The system would be required to ingest 12 hours each day across the 22 channels of incoming footage. The daily total would be more than 250 hours of footage multiplied by the 20 days of Olympics coverage.

“And that's only the amount of work ingested live,” notes Hansen. “There are also the productions in-house, like reports about the athletes, behind the scenes, etc. On the editing side, we’re using Final Cut Pro. But once the material leaves Final Cut, we have to deliver the finished packages to the studios and directly into the rundowns so the stories can go on air immediately. This needs to happen even while the event is still in progress and the footage is still being ingested. We're lucky enough that FCP works with QuickTime, which is pretty much the only true cross-platform media format that exists. So we can use a lot of other systems and everybody can read/write each other’s files.” Part two coming soon!