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NBC 30 Rock

The Background

NBC30Rock is NBC Universals facility based in Manhattan, NYC, NY. Their Digital Production Systems (DPS) department, which is responsible for the post-production of their network news programs as well as their news magazine shows, is located within this facility.

Solution components

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The Customer Challenge

NBCU had the need to find a new tool that would allow them to ingest old tapes into their Avid based post production systems. The new tool they desired had to meet multiple special requirements.

  • For redundancy purposes record the same signal into two systems:

  • Have the capacity to capture a signal and write it into two Avid Interplay | Production systems or one Interplay | Production and one Interplay | MAM system at the same time.

  • Have the capacity to detect time code breaks in tapes and automatically create new clips when they are detected

  • Without stopping the VTR on each time code break. 

  • Record at least two channels per system.

  • Write both a high resolution and a proxy version and check them into the same asset.

Apart from the special requirements the tool would also need to include traditional features such as:

  • Control of an array of VTRs from Sony and Panasonic via RS-422 using VTR Protocol. 

  • Read time code via the RS-422 connection.

  • Be capable of recording SD or HD signals.

  • Have the capacity to encode those signals into multiple codec types.

  • The challenge was finding a company to custom build such a tool for them since there was no off the shelf solution that met their special requirements.

The Solution and Workflow

After evaluating existing market options that might be customizable to meet their special requirements NBCU partnered with Glookast.

Gloobox Capturer, baseband capture solution, already met the traditional requirements, had tight integration into Avid’s Interplay | Production system, and already met some of the special requirements. 

Glookast proceeded to add the missing special requirements to Gloobox Capturer.

The following capabilities were added:

  • Write the same asset into two Interplay | Productions, using the same unique media identifier.

  • Have the capacity to wrap the same asset into two different containers and write them to two separate storage systems simultaneously.

  • High resolution should be wrapped into both Op-Atom and Op-1a

  • Proxy should be wrapped into both Op-Atom and MP4.

  • Provide Avid’s Interplay | MAM with metadata, via the creation of an XML file readable by the MAM system, at the same time as similar metadata is being checked into Interplay | Production.

After the new capabilities were added to Gloobox Capturer, Glookast and NBCU worked together to fine tune the new capabilities and insure the special requirements were fully met.

Once the new features were extensively tested in a sand box environment NBCU proceeded to deploy multiple Gloobox Capturer systems at their 30Rock facility and have also expanded its use to their North Bergen facility. 

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