Migrating archive news to a completely tapeless system

The Customer

bTV is the first private-owned national television channel in Bulgaria. It is owned by bTV Media Group, a part of Central European Media Enterprises, and is reportedly the Bulgarian television channel with the largest audience. bTV offers a wide selection of thematic programs, covering a wide range of formats – serials, shows, reality shows, talk shows, comedy, movies, among others. bTV news provide the most important and reliable information and perspectives in the country and is crucial for bTV success.

The Partner

Bulcomp, MOG Technologies’ partner, has been the responsible company for the deployment of mxfSPEEDRAIL system and has assisted bTV in the whole process of planning, integrating and configuring mxfSPEEDRAIL system.
Bulcomp Ltd was established in 1997 and provides professional video equipment, digital recording systems, storage and archiving solutions and networks development for the broadcast market.

The Challenge

The challenge consisted in the migration of bTV’s archive and news production processes into a completely tapeless and flexible system. In order to accomplish this challenge, bTV has installed 15 mxfSPEEDRAIL units for SDI recording, file-based ingest and publishing of media directly from its editing islands. The main goal of the project consisted in providing bTV with an overall control of every step of the production workflow. By acquiring the mxfSPEEDRAIL product family, bTV was able to accelerate its production processes allowing a smooth transition to HD production with the new mxfSPEEDRAIL file-based capabilities. The installation was made with other brands and systems which strengthens mxfSPEEDRAIL’s full interoperability.

The Solution

Migrating archive news to a completely tapeless system

mxfSPEEDRAIL S1000 – SDI Recorder MOG’s HD/SDI recorder mxfSPEEDRAIL S1000, has offered bTV the ability to digitize its tape archive into AVC-Intra high quality video codec, thus allowing editing the media immediately while digitizing. In order to simplify an accurate identification of the material, mxfSPEEDRAIL S1000 also has a practical and powerful annotation engine that allows metadata addition to the digitized clips, in order to easily keep track of the assets. mxfSPEEDRAIL F1000 – File-Based Ingest Working in parallel with S1000, MOG’s powerful file-based ingest system – mxfSPEEDRAIL F1000 – provides a centralized approach to automatically ingest any type of media files. After the ingest process is completed, the files are normalized into AVID OPAtom format which enables the content distribution for editing and archive systems. The ingested media is immediately available at the new Avid ISIS 5000, allowing a collaborative editing among Avid editors. bTV editors can start editing while the video server is still recording with the possibility to pre-select, trim or merge the ingested material. The system is also able to check-in directly into Avid Interplay Media Asset Management. mxfSPEEDRAIL O1000 – File-Based Outgest Upon editing in Avid suite, the EDL sequences are directly stitched and published by mxfSPEEDRAIL O1000. Working in the background to free the editor, mxfSPEEDRAIL O1000 publishes the media directly to playout video server as MXF OP1A and to bTV’s website as MPEG-4/H.264 files.