Customer Story

Customer Story

 

The Challenge: Growing Requirements of TV Production

Every day the authors of RingierTV produce scripts and screenplays, camera crews shoot video recordings, cutters get all these shots to flow smoothly in one seamless story. A total of nine hours broadcast is produced each week. To provide and secure the costly generated digital content as well as project data, RingierTV searched for an extremely reliable, flexible and scalable solution. Both backup for data storage and data relocation to a tape-based long term archive should be configurable without restrictions. The incidental data volume required a high-performance solution with high-speed throughput. In addition, an extensive 24/7 availability is needed for TV production.

 

An insight into the complex work cycle of TV production illustrates the data flow and the high requirements concerning availability and security. After development and production, the raw elements are edited. Cut lists are produced as log files, stored on Xserve RAID 5 and – now with PresSTORE – secured on the backup server. At editing suits the film material is processed. These editing suits differ in their connection to the memory area. A part of them is connected to an Xsan (Apple). The jointly used Xsan offers benefits for parallel work at different parts of a program, as the relevant data is thus available contemporaneously at every editing suit. An automatic synchronization with the synchronize module of PresSTORE provides the duplex maintenance of production data. For more extensive projects like image films or ad production the Xserve Raid, directly connected to the editing suit, is more advantageous. On the one hand, you can work independently from other projects. On the other hand, more disk space is available for the single project. If necessary, jointly used content and project data can be copied separately to a particular editing suite. Every completed production is shifted to the second XSan, where corrections can be made before the release to DVD. Post production, review and indexing for long term archiving run on this system, too. Afterwards, PresSTORE saves the accumulated data and shifts it for archiving to a tape library.

 

 

The solution: Archiware’s PresSTORE

RingierTV came to a decision in favor of PresSTORE because EMC Retrospect had not shown any evidence of further development which could satisfy the flexibility requirements of TV production. In addition, the continuously growing data volume exceeded the capacity of Retrospect. Thus, the company examined various alternative solutions with regard to the requirements described above. The first test installation of Archiware’s software PresSTORE had already left an exceptional mark concerning reliability. Especially the flexible licensing enthused the decision makers of RingierTV. Against the background of a configuration extension with additional redundancy capacity, an off-site outsourcing of the archive and the online access to all meta data of archived productions, a well arranged integration of hardware upgrades into existent licenses was crucial. Furthermore, the professional support, the price performance ratio and the simple configurability and browser- based handling were convincing. Another adjuvant feature was the setup of processes which can be initiated by the individual user, for example an editor activating the archive process.

Configuration:
8 Xserve computer
10 XserveRAID Systems (storage space > 40TB)
2 XSan Systems
10 editing suits MacPro
Tape-Library Overland Neo 4100
approx. 120 workstations Mac OS X und Win XP

 

J. Bauer, responsible for RingierTV’s IT and mediamatic

 

 

RingierTV is Switzerland’s largest private producer of TV programs. Among successful productions are CASH-TV, konsumTV, Motor Show tcs, Celebrations al dente as well as productions for SAT1 Schweiz, Pro7 Schweiz and Teleclub Sport. The business segment Ringier TV Business Productions realizes orders in all application areas of motion pictures: Films, Video, Multimedia and the Internet.