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January 2011 Digital Rapids C2 Streamlines Media Transfer Between Facilities for Torstar Media Group Television
tmgtv.ca
by Greg Wynter, Manager of Engineering and Technology, Torstar Media Group Television
The Challenge: Efficiently moving content in multiple formats between production and playout facilities in different cities and encoding content for compatibility with legacy playout servers and new multi-platform opportunities
The Solution: Digital Rapids C2 and Digital Rapids Stream
The Benefits: "C2 is constantly moving media files reliably between our facilities in whatever format we need while being friendly to other network traffic."
"The Digital Rapids solutions 'just worked', delivering on their promises without deployment hassles, and helping us successfully meet our short timelines."
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Torstar Media Group Television (TMGTV) operates both a 24-hour direct-response television channel, Shop TV Canada, and a direct-response production division, TMGTV Productions. TMGTV Productions produces infomercials not only for the Shop TV channel, but also for external clients to run on other television channels. As Manager of Engineering and Technology, my role covers an extensive scope of responsibilities for our broadcast infrastructure, from budget planning to workflow design, equipment implementation and training our operators and engineers. With the move to file-based workflows, I've had to expand upon my 15 years of television industry experience, incorporating knowledge of IT systems and networking.
The Challenges: Time, Distance and Formats
 In the summer of 2010, we began to redesign and relocate our master control operations. With over 80% of our own programming now in HD and several different formats to ingest and play to air, we had outgrown our existing facility. We had an aggressive timeline for the project. The old saying that 'time waits on no man' was a reality, and our schedule allowed just 28 days to build the new master control, playout and monitoring installation plus editing suites, and link them all together. And of course, we needed our existing operations to stay on the air the whole time, with a seamless cutover.
One of the key elements of the project was the need to efficiently move content in multiple formats between our editing and production facility in Hamilton, Ontario (around 65km from Toronto) and our Toronto playout facility.
We determined that IP-based file transfer was the best approach for moving the content. Beyond cost considerations, transporting video tapes between facilities is no longer practical even locally, since manpower is limited. Moving the media as files instead of tapes would also allow us to keep them in their native format. We work in many different compression and container formats, including DVCPRO, DVCPRO HD, DVCAM, HDCAM, XDCAM, Red, Avid DNxHD, MPEG-2 and GXF.
To make this happen, we needed a product that could handle flexible, high-demand file transfer between the cities. And given our tight timeframes, we needed a proven solution -- we had no time for guess work or playing around with configuration. We had tried several other products before, but they did not work as promised.
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