Czech TV Speeds Broadcast and Production Delivery With DDN

DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) announced that Czech Television, the public television broadcaster in the Czech Republic, has implemented its MEDIAScaler parallel file storage for better support of an explosion of digital video content and the demands of high-end production equipment, challenging 4K workflows and ultra-HD formats.

In meeting its goal to deliver news, sports and entertainment broadcasting 24/7, including a wealth of original programming, Czech TV required high level of storage performance and capacity.

The organisation had to ensure uninterrupted workflows across video ingest, editing, transcoding, distribution and archiving. In addition, Czech TV needed to accommodate multiple teams of people working on the same large files who were performing necessary color corrections and also restoring many old films that were in bad condition. To eliminate potential performance bottlenecks and operational delays, the company upgraded its legacy DDN storage infrastructure with a MEDIAScaler, an integrated storage platform with 1PB of capacity and more than 7GB/s single-stream performance to keep pace with the most data-intensive media workflows.

According to Jaroslav Sladek, video department chief, Czech Television, data access is strategic to maximizing production value while minimizing time to delivery both now and in the future.

“DDN’s MEDIAScaler is an essential piece of our future global storage network,” he says. “And the best part of all is that the platform does exactly what it’s supposed to do. The best product is the one you forget about because it simply works-and that’s DDN.“

As Czech TV’s centralised, shared storage solution, MEDIAScaler supports multiple workloads, including 2K scanning using a Bone Spirit scanner; 4K restoration via three Diamant restoration suites; 4K color correction with two Baselight 4, four-node clusters; both 4K and 2K color correction using Baselight 2; and 2K DVS Clipster for finalizing production files. The storage enables more workload clients to be added as needed while streamlining the process of adding more drives and storage capacity without disrupting operations.

With DDN, satisfying evolving requirements, such as 3D and 8K formats is straightforward, as is accommodating a move to open networking. DDN’s support of OpenFlow, the emerging industry protocol for enabling software-defined networking, gives Czech TV a fast, flexible path to the future. The trouble-free implementation was completed in less than two weeks with no disruption in critical operations. Moreover, various teams from both broadcast and post-production work on massive files concurrently without any performance degradation.

“DDN’s MEDIAScaler provided an all-in-one turnkey solution designed to overcome the scale, performance and cost hurdles associated with data-hungry media environments,” says David Stein, CEO, Interlab, a France-based systems integrator with experience in the film and broadcast industries. “This made it easy for Czech TV to grow capacity and performance with both scale-up and scale-out schema.“

DDN supports more than 600 media and entertainment installations, including some of the biggest in the industry.