Silex Media expands the adoption of AtomFactory and extends its Apple-centric solution portfolio with Evangelische Omroep (EO)

NAB Show - Las Vegas, April, 2008 - Silex Media, a leading digital workflow solution provider focusing on the Broadcast and Media market, announces the successful completion of an end-to-end broadcast production workflow project at Dutch public broadcaster EO, which integrates an Apple QuickTime based production environment with an IMX-based workflow for ingesting, archive and playout using technology from both DAVID Systems and BUG.tv.

EO turned to Silex Media to help them solve this workflow integration problem. Silex Media implemented a cost-effective solution in the form of DAVID Systems' AtomFactory, which provides on-the-fly "Transwrapping" between QuickTime and MXF wrapper formats. Floris van der Bijl, project manager from EO commented "This approach not only solved our integration problem, but also accelerated our workflow by additionally providing us with edit-whilst-ingest and playout-whilst-fusing capability". 

In addition to program production, EO also has its several studios that are used for the production of different live and recorded programs. Their newest studio provided by Sony Professional Services required a completely tapeless ingest and playout capability. Again, EO required a purely Apple-based environment for the solution to work upon. Working alongside Sony PSE on this project, Silex Media implemented a solution based upon software from the Canadian technology provider BUG.tv.

The result is that all ingested material is available for editing within seconds after the recording is finished and material that is required for playout can be available on all playout channels very quickly after production is finished. As the ingest and playout servers work natively with QuickTime material, no conversion to and from MXF was required in this case. The playout servers were finally integrated with the Ross Overdrive system, so that playout control is closely integrated with the other studio systems.

Kees Vos, the Silex Media project manager summarized the projects: "a key differentiator was having in depth knowledge of integrating with best-of-breed products like Final Cut Pro but also the extensive experience we had in delivering complete solutions to broadcasters based on modern tapeless workflows. As a result we were able to minimize risk and deliver cost-effective solutions."

Project Background

EO has seven fixed Final Cut Pro editing suites that are all clients on a production XSAN as well as many licenses on laptop systems. As the program production environment is exclusively using Apple's Final Cut Pro, which does not support the MXF wrapper format but only QuickTime, the challenge for EO has been to integrate this seamlessly into the wider MXF based environment they work together with the other public broadcasters in the Netherlands.

Ingested material for new programming comes from two main sources: Sony XDCam cameras for newly captured material; IMMIX (Dutch national transmission archive) which holds all archived content material from the all public broadcast channels. Both of these ingest sources supply material solely in an MXF-OP1a wrapped format.

For program playout, the finished material is sent to the shared central playout facility at NOB (DDV). Once transmitted from this facility, the material is then archived to the IMMIX archive DDV. Again, this material is required by the facility in MXF-OP1a wrapped format. Rules for MXF compliance are very strict in this process as this is the long-term transmission archive of all Dutch public broadcasters.

The BUG.tv solution implemented by Silex Media consists of 5 XServe servers, each of which are clients on the production XSAN. These servers then host the BUG.tv software, consisting of 2 independent ingest channels and 3 playout channels. 

About Evangelische Omroep

About Silex Media