EDIT2 - a case story

Future development

In the course of this project we have acquired an understanding of many issues relating to the design and specification of computer hardware and software for bropadcast television editing applications. Most of the knowledge we have accumulated, has had a driect bearing on the system as it stands now. But this process, and especially the access to Dell staff and their knowledge base, has given us an insight into the ways in which this system could be extended in the future.

Besides the physical housing costs, a digital edit suite comprises three major areas of capital investment -

Workstation and NLE hardware/software
Storage media
Peripheral video/audio equipment

The last item - peripheral equipment - is only strictly necessary on the first edit suite in a facility. Most of the editing process is undertaken within the digital domain, and requires a minimum amount of monitoring equipment. Additional production capacity could be secured by establishing a second edit suite, and productions in this suite would use the primary suite for digitisation and playout, or for more complicated signal processing. Alternatively, a second suite could be established within our existing analogue suite, drawing on the existing investment of peripheral VTR's and monitoring equipment.

To reduce the cost of such a second workstation, and to enable projects to be moved from one suite to another to have access to relevant peripheral equipment, shared storage would be necessary. This would also repesent an attractive reduction in the capital cost of establishing a second suite.

With the solution established for EDIT2, we have ensured the maximum possible bandwidth for media data - in fact the existing installation has sufficient overhead to support approximately three times the current access rate.

The logical progression from the existing installation would therefore be to replace the existing workstation with a rack optimised server, which would handle the Power vault media storage and contain a Gigabit network adapter for connection to client workstations. The existing workstation would also have a gigabit network adapter.

With the addition of a second ///FAST silver. card and breakout boxes, a second workstation, similar to the Precision 530, would also be established.

Additional workstations could be established for specific applications such as audio editing and video duplication.

As yet this solution has not been tried using Dell components, but the current performance data indicates that the approach is feasible. If such a system performed well, it could open the way for future development of dedicated SAN technology for broadcast television applications, in which the server and storage solution would be upgraded to more suitable server products in the Dell range.

Whilst a large multi-user environment lies outside our requirements, a two or three workstation environment with share storage is within our experimental capabilities and should be pursued in the future.