Techniques
COVERING SPORTS :Archiving Speed
By Andrew Shapiro
Sep 30, 2004, 10:20

With a minimum of four video crews covering nearly 100 NASCAR events a year, NASCAR Images, the exclusive rights holder of NASCAR footage, generates massive amounts of video, audio, and stills. To manage and archive this amount of media, which is used for video and commercial production, marketing and sales videos, customized DVD premiums, and turnkey television production, NASCAR Images turned to VideoBank Digital.
A joint venture of NASCAR Digital Entertainment and the Fox Cable Network, NASCAR Images manages all video access to NASCAR events as well as the world’s largest NASCAR footage library. NASCAR Images is a state-of-the-art video production facility that serves as the exclusive producer of officially licensed NASCAR home entertainment videos and DVDs and no less than eight NASCAR-based television programs. It also helps to develop numerous third-party client productions.
That’s why NASCAR Images had the need for an archival process that maintains both high- and low-resolution video, specifically organized so it can be searched by identifying race action, driver sponsor data, interviews, and shot types. At the same time, NASCAR Images felt it essential to keep control over their video assets while exploiting a technology to automate the archival process: They wanted to avoid the various problems that other organizations have encountered using an outsourcing model to achieve their archival objectives—outsourcing scenarios often leading to inflexibility due to the fast-changing technology curve, while making the client completely reliant on the service provider.
To do this NASCAR Images turned to VideoBank. An archival solution specialist offering a tool set that encompasses a great percentage of the components needed for digital management implementation, VideoBank has created a general Digital Access Management System whose metadata language can be customized to accommodate the workflow requirements for specific fields to describe the assets, various formats of assets, and the distribution process of these assets that are unique to each industry and client. This general tool set, “working very much the same way but with different categorizations,” according to VideoBank’s sales director Tab Butler, can be easily applied to various industries, including the entertainment, archival, medical, research, and government areas.
For NASCAR Images, VideoBank set up a solution employing its Multi-Channel Encoding System and V-Touch Screen Logging System that allows NASCAR Images to capture user-driven data sets synchronized to the live, incoming satellite video feed. First, capturing the footage in MPEG-1 proxy form and automatically transcoding it to the required streaming formats, these streaming formats, as well as the data created with the VideoBank loggers, are exported to a Web interface that NASCAR Images uses to search and create collections from the archive. Second, the footage is encoded at a higher resolution for the live feeds and for all the historical content.
The high-resolution footage is then stored on the VideoBank LTO tape-based system and can be viewed and searched using the low-resolution proxy version. Then the high-resolution video versions of the search results are transferred to production for editing on nonlinear edit systems, eliminating the need to go back to videotape unless required by an external request.
Production can then be handled by NASCAR Images’ 27,200-square-foot video facility, which houses 1,200-square feet of studio space, five Avid Symphony NLE suites loaded with the latest Saphire Effect plug-ins, Adobe’s After Effects 6.0 production bundle, 9.5TB of Unity storage, a master control/digital linear edit suite, and an audio booth. Otherwise, clients can take advantage of the Digital Access Management System’s remote capabilities, which bring content directly to the client wherever they are in the world, allowing them to instantly access the footage they desire with a simple word search.
Ultimately, with the Digital Asset Management System put in place by VideoBank, NASCAR Images and their clients are able to store, manage, search, and, more importantly, put to use more than 30,000 hours of NASCAR history by simply plugging and chugging information.



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