Signiant’s Digital Media Galaxy

In episode two of the Digital Media Galaxy podcast, Tom Ohanian elaborates on why central management of digital media distribution workflows is an absolute requirement for effective collaboration and coordination in the the entertainment industry’s production ecosystem. We welcome your feedback. Please email editor@digitalmediagalaxy.com or post a comment on our blog at www.digitalmediagalaxy.com

 

 DMG #2: Central management [23:28m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
 Podcast Transcript: Download

I was blown away by this article in Broadcast Engineering which rather dryly notes:

Implementation of dual-link 3Gb/s distribution methods for 1080 60p would reduce the capacity of an existing HD infrastructure by 50 percent. SMPTE has issued 3Gb/s standards (424M, 425M) that can be used for intrafacility 1080 60p SDI distribution over a single coax cable. An alternate method could be to work in the compressed domain, with 1080 60p content compressed at 200Mb/s data rates or higher. This format could be distributed using SDTI, ASI or over the media network (TCP/IP). In this way, 1080 60p content will survive the editing and production process, and produce acceptable, artifact-free video.

Broadcasters are concerned with converting their production infrastructures to support 1080i (or 720p) HD content. Any thought of expanding production to 1080 60p or 2K is well out of mind.

Do you react to what I did: a reduction in capacity of 50% just to support 1080p? Talk about drinking from a fire hose.

We believe that this explosion of media (you’d have to call anything with a bit rate of 200Mb/s explosive) needs a comprehensive and open strategy for managing it. We don’t believe the industry should be behind the availability of consumer devices because of the size or cost of distributing digital media. Consumer 1080p TVs and disk formats mean that broadcasters have to respond quickly or face further challenges from alternative sources of 1080p content.

Ever since yesterday, when Tom and I recorded the first Digital Media Galaxy podcast, I’ve been thinking hard about the challenges he discussed in that episode.

Then, today, I ran across this story in Broadcast Engineering.

The predictions of what’s going to happen (30Mb/sec in the home!) in the short term has gotta make the harried production supervisor we were discussing want to tear his or her hair out trying to get all that content ready.

But that’s nothing compared to the impact on the M&E industry in general…especially those companies whose workflows don’t allow them to take advantage of these new distribution capabilities because their digital media distribution management systems can’t support these opportunities.

You won’t be surprised to hear that we think the “secret sauce of success” in this radically changing ecosystem is having the ability to manage, secure, automate and accelerate the (endless) movement of digital media in this new world.

Everything you read, everything you hear points to this being a key, critical capability for M&E companies.

Our initial podcast is now online. We hope you like it…and that you’ll let us know what you think. We had originally intended for the podcast to be about 10 minutes. But, as you’ll hear, we had so much to say, we ran for about 30 minutes. That tells us there’s a lot more we want to say…so we’ll be back with another podcast very soon that expands on the subjects discussed here.

In this episode, Tom Ohanian describes what he means when he talks about “file-based workflows” and why this change in the way media and entertainment companies work is so incredibly important in today’s competitive marketplace.

 

 DMG #1: file-based workflows [29:58m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
 Podcast Transcript: Download

Frequent readers of blogs always seek out the first post to see what the blog’s intent is. If it catches their fancy…well, the blogger might get lucky and get a subscriber.

Bloggers really sweat these first posts: What if it stinks? What if I don’t have real content to deliver regularly that would make people take the feed or come back?

Well, for this blog, that’s not going to be a problem. Because this blog is the place where we are going to talk about (and podcast on) what the move to file-based workflows means for the media and entertainment industry.

Let’s not pull any punches: this is the blog of Signiant, a software company that believes there are enormous challenges in the move to FBWs. We aren’t going to hide that fact. Nor are we going to shy away from discussing how our view of the digital media distribution management problem is solved by Signiant.

So, we have a point of view we think is compelling. And we want to engage the M&E community in that discussion.

But what we hope will really set this blog’s content apart from the crass commercialism of corporate blogs (in addition to the clever writing (-: ) is that Tom Ohanian will be a major presence on this blog.

As many of you know, Tom was instrumental in transitioning the M&E business to non-linear editing as part of his work at Avid. And if you talk to Tom today (as we will be shortly via podcasts), you can hear the same passion in his thinking about what the challenges and benefits of file-based workflows mean today.

So, please add us to your aggregator and come back regularly. We’ve got a lot to say. Some of it you will agree with. Some will make you think. And, hopefully, some of it will make you laugh.