Untitled Document
ADIC – TV star
From STORAGE Magazine
Vol 4 No 05 - September/October 2004
Mersey Television is the innovative programme maker behind mega-hits ‘Hollyoaks’,
‘Grange Hill’, ‘Brookside’ and ‘The Courtroom’. To manage the vast amounts of
data associated with TV production, the company has installed ADIC’s Pathlight
VX disk-to-tape solution and Scalar 100 tape library.
Mersey Television is a technology leader both on set and behind the scenes. To
film legal drama, ‘The Courtroom’, the company used remote-controlled cameras,
so that the performance wouldn’t be interrupted by the act of filming. The
programme – Channel 4’s first original regular daytime drama – is known for its
controversial storylines that tackle contemporary problems in society.
This comes as no surprise to those who know Mersey Television for ‘Brookside’.
The gritty soap opera ran from Channel 4’s launch in 1982 until 2003 and helped
to define the ‘new’ station’s identity. Instead of using studio sets, Brookside
creator and Mersey Television founder Phil Redmond decided to shoot it all on
real locations. Throughout its life, much of the programme was shot in Brookside
Close, a small estate of modern houses in a Liverpool suburb which Mersey TV
bought for the programme.
This drive for authenticity has been extended to Mersey TV’s teen soap Hollyoaks
and children’s classic Grange Hill, both filmed in the converted college that
houses the company’s headquarters.
With the dependence on location shooting came another decision: to shoot these
programmes with a single camera, the way that movies are made. In part, it was a
pragmatic choice, because in most of the locations there would not be room for
more than one camera. But it was also part of Redmond’s vision to create
high-quality drama.
Originally, this was all recorded on videotape and simply keeping track of all
the cassettes was a mammoth undertaking. Just loading every reel into the
editing systems was a full-time job for several people.
Technical director Graham Deaves closely tracks the latest developments in
technology. He knew how to change radically the workflow and leant on
manufacturers to come up with the equipment to achieve his vision.
“The result is that now the bulk of the shooting bypasses videotape altogether,”
he says. The output of high-quality digital cameras is recorded directly on to
video servers, provided by the specialist UK company Gee.
Digital video creates a huge amount of data - the Mersey Television system, for
example, runs at 50 megabits a second. While filming its hit television series,
Mersey TV can produce 300GB of data a day.
“Each episode of The Courtroom amounts to 200GB of data and we can have 40
episodes in post-production at the same time,” says Mersey Television technical
director Graham Deaves. “We have limited storage space on our 8TB SAN and often
have to take data off and restore it later for post-production work.”
To increase the company’s near-online storage capacity without replacing its
existing backup infrastructure, Mersey Television has installed an ADIC
Pathlight VX.
Pathlight VX is an integrated disk-to-tape backup solution that combines the
speed and efficiency of disk-based backup with the cost and portability benefits
of tape. With the Pathlight VX, data is backed up to disk, from where it is
automatically written to tape in the background, easing pressure on backup
windows. It can also be plugged straight into an existing IT infrastructure,
where it appears to the system as one or more logical tape libraries. The Mersey
Television Pathlight VX has 23 TB of disk-based storage capacity in support of
the company’s 8TB SAN.
The speed with which data can be restored to the SAN was an important factor in
the buying decision. “We had a serious failure recently,” says Deaves, “where
two disks in one tier of the main SAN failed on the same night. It took us three
days to recover the data from the tape backup. Using Pathlight VX, we will be
able to recover data to the SAN quickly.”
Mersey Television is using Veritas NetBackup as its backup management software.
“As far as NetBackup is concerned, the Pathlight VX looks like a bigger tape
machine and it can be installed without changing any hardware or software. The
Pathlight VX will perform backups from disk to tape in the background, reducing
the impact a backup has on our main network.”
According to Steve Mackey, director of product marketing EMEA, ADIC, this has
had a huge beneficial impact. “Our customers have reported that their backup
speeds have doubled, and restore speeds have more than doubled. In a
high-pressure broadcast environment, it has a massive impact when large files
can be backed up and restored in half the time it takes to write directly to and
from tape.
“Mersey Television is making innovative use of the Pathlight VX by using it for
near-online storage during the production process, as well as using it to
facilitate backups and this is a testament to the product’s performance.”
For its tape library, Mersey TV uses ADIC’s Scalar 100, chosen as the most
robust and scalable solution for meeting the company’s demanding requirements.
“Production teams might be shooting in four different parts of the building
separately,” confirms Graham Deaves. “On top of that, there are seven editing
rooms, each of which needs access to the data and each of which is also creating
more material itself, not to mention the six sound-dubbing suites which take the
programmes and smooth the audio and add effects. All are accessing the same
programme material – the data – at the same time.”
The result is that the network has six Gee video servers, each capable of two
channels, attached to 8 terabytes of RAID storage from Data Direct Networks. And
because digital video cannot tolerate any data delays – you have to have a
complete new picture every twenty-fifth of a second - the SAN has eight gigabit
Ethernet pipes.
Data loss cannot be tolerated. A dropped byte is likely to be a visible or
audible glitch. Any loss of data at all in the system means re-shooting a scene,
which is at best expensive and time-consuming, but more likely just impossible
to schedule. The backup regime is therefore vital.
The ADIC Scalar 100 serves two functions. First, in conjunction with Veritas
software, it maintains a high level of security, with regular complete backups,
as well as daily incremental backups. The RAID array has proved highly reliable,
but being without the security of rapid reconstruction of any part of the data
is unthinkable. Secondly, once each episode is broadcast, an archive copy of all
the data is produced. A single 100GB LTO tape can (just about) include all the
raw footage, the edit decision lists, graphics and special effects for a single
episode of Hollyoaks. Archiving completed programmes keeps the main servers
clear, but allows the material to be available quickly, should anyone need to
review it.
“The Scalar 100 is especially well suited for high-pressure environments like
broadcasting,” says Steve Mackey, “where organising, protecting and accessing
network data is more important – and more complex - than ever. It is highly
space-efficient, offering unrivalled density, and provides simple, trouble-free
scalability. Capacity can also be added in low-cost increments, without the need
for pass-through ports or multiple robotic systems.
“Like all our libraries, it also offers full interoperability and, critically,
integrates ADIC’s exclusive storage networking support to improve the
reliability and performance of Mersey Television’s SAN backup,” he confirms. “In
short, whether the pressure is on exploding data growth, tightening budgets or
reduced management resources, the Scalar 100’s intelligent connectivity and
management capability makes it easy to integrate, operate and service.”
Graham Deaves highlights its value to broadcasting: "A robust and reliable
back-up system is essential in an industry where the value of the data is so
high,” he says. “A corrupted file could mean that a recorded shot is lost and
would require an expensive re-shoot. Each day, we add about 100GB of new
material to the SAN and each night this is backed-up by the Scalar 100."
Mersey Television leads the world with its direct-to-server production system
and its commitment to highly secure archiving and backup, based around ADIC’s
proven storage technology, is now the perfect complement to that status.
|
