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September 2009 NAB Show Expands Video Coverage Online with Digital Rapids Transcode Manager
www.nabshow.com
by Aaron Cullers, Manager, Convention Marketing, National Association of Broadcasters
"While almost anyone can now put their video on the web, doing so efficiently and automatically under the demands of on-site event coverage, and at such a high level of quality level that even video-savvy viewers are impressed, requires a top-caliber solution..."
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For the 2009 NAB Show, the interactive and marketing teams at NAB set out to significantly expand our online video coverage of the event, increasing both the quantity and quality of content available on our website at www.nabshow.com. In essence, our goal was to serve as a web 2.0 newsroom, while also creating unique and dynamic content for consumption by the entire lifecycle.
 In addition to our usual daily show highlights packages, we also produced feature segments from the exhibition floor hosted by ‘on-air’ talent; segments from NAB sessions, luncheons and keynotes; interviews; and after-hours and off-site clips to help convey the overall atmosphere of the NAB Show and its positive effects on not only Las Vegas, but the industry as a whole.
One of our key requirements for this project was timeliness. Not just ensuring that content was made available online as quickly as possible, but also creating an efficient workflow process that freed up our post-production team to continue creating upcoming segments, and not necessarily focusing on the encoding process for the web and mobile platforms. Similarly, we wanted to minimize the effort required by our website staff. For these efforts, we relied upon Digital Rapids’ Transcode Manager software on-site for the encoding, and this decision insured that we were going to achieve exceptional efficiency, performance and automation for the project.
Once the footage captured by our roving production teams was edited, the finished segments were transferred to the Transcode Manager system over a local network. The Digital Rapids software accepted final source files from a variety of post-production systems with ease — important to us because of the collaborative effort of our editing teams.
High definition (1080i) source files in Avid DNxHD and Apple ProRes formats were transferred to a ‘watch folder’ monitored by the Transcode Manager software. Upon arrival of new files, Transcode Manager automatically transcoded them into the formats required for our website (using H.264 compression for our Adobe Flash-based video player) and mobile distribution. Some of the content was intended only for the web, so automated rules were set up following a naming convention used by the editors. Based on the input filename, Transcode Manager knew whether to encode and deliver for both web and mobile delivery, or just for the web.
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