1 Mission: An integrated Asset Management solution for Quantel sQ servers This article describes the technical design and operational features of Quantel‟s „Mission‟ asset management system. The motivation to develop Mission was commercial: at the time, Quantel‟s highly successful sQ server systems relied on third-party products to provide a number of common workflows, including scheduled recording and archive management. Our customers wanted a cost-effective and highly-integrated solution provided within the familiar Quantel user experience. The Mission solution is scalable to meet the requirements of all but the largest broadcast installations. Trevor Francis is Worldwide Marketing Manager, Broadcast at Quantel Ltd. in Newbury, UK. His responsibility includes steering the roadmap for product development, heading the product management team and producing presentations and papers for major trade shows.
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An Integrated Asset Management Solution For Quantel sQ Servers
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Mission: An integrated Asset Management
solution for Quantel sQ servers This article describes the technical design and operational features of Quantel‟s „Mission‟
asset management system. The motivation to develop Mission was commercial: at the time,
Quantel‟s highly successful sQ server systems relied on third-party products to provide a
number of common workflows, including scheduled recording and archive management.
Our customers wanted a cost-effective and highly-integrated solution provided within the
familiar Quantel user experience. The Mission solution is scalable to meet the requirements
of all but the largest broadcast installations.
Trevor Francis is Worldwide Marketing Manager, Broadcast at Quantel Ltd. in Newbury, UK. His
responsibility includes steering the roadmap for product development, heading the product management team
and producing presentations and papers for major trade shows.
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Introduction
Mission is a media and asset management system specifically designed for Quantel‟s
server-based production system. It provides extended facilities for the acquisition,
movement, viewing and management of video, file-based media and associated metadata.
Mission has been designed to be modular, allowing our customers to select the workflows
they need, adding more features as and when required.
The feature list includes e.g.:
Scheduled baseband recording tool for capturing video-based feeds
File-based ingest from a both broadcast and domestic/consumer source with built-in automated transcode
Automated capture and association of incoming XML-based metadata – from news agencies, for example
Automated VTR ingest controller
Archive output to disk, data tape or VTR
Advanced search and retrieve of on-line and archived assets from editors desktop
Search and view of media assets from standard web browser.
Media and metadata output to multiple destinations based on a scripted transcode and destination file path
The following diagram shows the workflows in relation to a typical four-server sQ solution.
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SDI ingest- ‘Mission Transfer’
Overview
A product called „Mission Transfer‟ controls ingest of video feeds via sQ Server baseband
HDSDI and SDI video ports.
Three types of job are supported:
Instant „crash recording‟. A spontaneous recording which is not planned.
Timed recording. A single job which will take place some time on the future.
Scheduled recordings. A diary of regular events from sources like News Agencies, overseas
bureaux etc.
The operator can use the Mission Transfer timeline view for direct scheduling of all
recordings. Each row represents an SDI/HDSDI port.
The operator can enter or modify the job parameters in the pop-up dialogue box. Properties
such as start and end time, recording channel, router cross-point are directly entered or
selected. Production metadata defaults to Title, Owner, category and Description. Other
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numeric or text fields are configured by the System Adminstrator (see later section). All
metadata may be added before, during or after a recording.
The status of a job is illustrated by its colour. For example, white indicates a job is queued;
yellow indicates that a job is currently being recorded; red indicates a fault.
The start and end times of a job may be modified by simple drag-and drop on the timeline.
Crash Recordings
These “spontaneous” recordings are started in the Timeline view of Transfer by selecting
the Crash Record function.
The duration of the recording is also set to a configurable default value but can be manually
extended. If however another recording is already scheduled for the same encoding channel,
the Crash Record job duration is set to one minute before the start of the following job.
The metadata may be subsequently entered after the start of the recording.
Repeated Recordings
Repeated recordings are managed using Periodic Jobs view. These are defined once then
subsequently Transfer automatically creates daily corresponding to each instance of the
recording.
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File-based input ‘Mission Transfer’
Mission Transfer utilises “Watch” folders to identify media to be imported into the Quantel
servers. The module periodically checks the contents of such Watch folders. If any new
clips are found, these are transferred to sQ Server and subsequently deleted from the Watch
folders.
Mission is scaled and configured to support multiple file ingest and output of standard
broadcast file formats as supported in the Quantel sQ server.
For any files containing non-broadcast file formats, wrappers or codecs, additional watch
folders may be provided to transcode these to a pre-set sQ server format.
A separate „track‟ on the Mission Transfer timeline screen allows the operator to see and
track file-based transactions and to trace progress or trouble-shoot any problems.
Mission uses an embedded Rhozet Carbon Coder to perform the transcodes.
The range of essence formats supported is constantly reviewed by Rhozet, but includes all
the most-used files generated by professional and domestic devices and software: