Mexico Goes to China - Part 2 of 2

I wrote two articles for the Final Cut Pro User's Group Supermeet at NAB. They appeared in the SuperMag magazine(which I named btw). Here's part two of the first article looking at an Apple network system that is being used at the Beijing Olympics this summer in China. For part one click here.

Simplemente chose to work with Gallery Software, a UK-based company that has been making QuickTime-compatible applications for over a decade. For the Beijing project, Simplemente selected Gallery’s SIENNA, a complete integration suite for connecting Final Cut Pro workstations to the traditional newsroom broadcast workflow. SIENNA was developed in response to the huge demand for Final Cut Pro integration from the world's leading news broadcasters. It brings compatibility to existing newsroom equipment for workflows based around native QuickTime and enables single media shared storage with Apple's Xsan.

“We’ve already started testing and training the complete solution with the operators from Televisa,” notes Reina. “Most of the editors came over from Pinnacle Vortex and they’re adjusting well. They like Final Cut Studio a lot. One of the greatest things is that you can be ingesting all those live streams and any of the workstations can access footage and start editing right away.”

“Now we have to put the complete solution together, test it and box it,” she continues. “Because it takes about two months to get a shipment of this size to China. It gets sent by boat along with all of the other cameras and support equipment that Televisa is sending. Then all of it has to go through the Chinese customs process. We’re also sending two people from Simplemente, Rune and one of our most brilliant young technicians, Saul Hernandez. This is in order to assure the best possible technical support for Televisa.”

Simplemente is still putting the final pieces of the puzzle together which includes the archiving system to backup all of those many hours of Olympics coverage. Hansen is looking into LTO-4 robotic tape libraries from Sun and Quantum to handle the load. Pausing from his work to consider the task ahead in China, Hansen observes, “more than just the complexity of this project, it's also extremely high profile. The risk obviously is very high. Thankfully we're seeing very high availability and performance from Final Cut and from SIENNA and we're also building in a lot of redundancy and backup workflows.”

“The most difficult part was getting all of the components that we required delivered on time together to test,” adds Reina. “Once we receive the gear, we know how to make it work. But there are always unknowns that you have to deal with and you never know until you have all of the equipment actually there and working together. She then adds with a smile, “ultimately we were able to solve every problem, at times like Jack Bauer on 24. The Simplemente motto is Adapt, Improvise and Overcome.”