“The PWS-4500’s XAVC codec is lean and beautiful, but the extraordinary scale of the event demanded the development of a new end-to-end workflow,” Green said. “We worked closely with AMV to design, implement and test a system that could handle this and AMV rose to the challenge by rethinking the boundaries.”
“We had to go for a broader scope than just acquisition,” said Tom D’Angelo, Director of Production Services at AMV. “In HD, our on-site services are often stove-piped and limited to acquisition, but with 4K on this scale we needed to develop a methodology for delivering many large files to archiving and post.”
The first thought was to simply purchase and swap out solid state drives (SSDs) after opening night with fresh ones. But that would add around a quarter-million dollars to the budget for media. Next, they explored the possibilities for dumping the data from the drives each night, overnight. Each option had issues.
“We got into tapeless to step away from buying media, and ultimately offer our clients greater cost-effective solutions,” said Eric Duke, AMV’s President. “Simply replicating a tape-based workflow with SSDs defeated that purpose. Our other option of dumping the SSDs to a SAN daily would take too long so we had to find a new approach.”
AMV’s workflow innovation was to push 4K content to multiple locations simultaneously. Here, Sony’s PWS-4500 production servers acted as the catch-all, pushing files to multiple networked destinations and speeding delivery of show content for post and archiving. For Green, the real question wasn’t whether or not to go with the PWS-4500’s, but how many were needed and how best to configure them to soak up the deluge of data.
“We did the math divvying up the data from all of the cameras,” said Green, “but we had to be sure the PWS-4500’s could hold up under sustained recording. In our testing we found that these are as robust as the specs claim. We had all of the pieces gathered and now had to put them together in a tight schedule.”
For AMV and the productions teams, the PWS-4500 answered the question of “How do we get many large 4K files to post production, to the archivist, and how do they move around the country efficiently?”
“With the 4500 server, we could record 4K in XAVC, which is very efficient, but also record and then push the files to multiple locations simultaneously,” said Leandro Blanco, Director of Engineering