Rodeohouston Deployed Front Porch Digital DIVAworks Solution

Front Porch Digital today announced that the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo audiovisual and broadcast branch has deployed Front Porch Digital’s DIVAworks solution, which is enhanced with DIVAdirector. The systems are able to support the transition to digital, tapeless workflow as well as to preserve and simplify access to stored content. Front Porch Digital partner Broadcast Digital Systems of Houston assisted with the transaction.

 
"There are several companies out there with products that enable you to move and store huge files," said James Davidson, managing director of audiovisual presentation and broadcast for the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. "What got our attention about Front Porch Digital was the flexibility of the database, the ability to customize metadata for searches, and the friendliness of the user interface. With DIVAworks and DIVAdirector, Front Porch Digital has given us just what we needed."

Since 1980, the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, the world’s largest livestock show and richest regular-season PRCA rodeo, has produced its own television programming both for broadcast and for the historical record, amassing tens of thousands of hours of content stored on videotape in multiple formats. The content represents the scope of the 20-day event that takes place at Houston’s Reliant Park every March, including not only footage of the rodeo competition but associated performances by musicians from Gene Autry to Beyoncé Knowles, and auctions of everything from champion steers to chardonnay.

As part of an HD upgrade two years ago, the rodeo began shifting to a digitized workflow. It now deploys 20 Sony cameras capturing HD content that is ingested to a Thomson Grass Valley K2 server and then managed and transferred, as appropriate, to LTO-4 tape by DIVAworks. DIVAdirector affords editors and producers working in three editing suites easy access to stored content. Clips can be searched by customized metadata — including sponsor, event, and competitor — or browsed frame by frame using the application’s built-in Windows Media Player. DIVAworks manages restoration of content from archive to server as needed.

With the digital workflow in place, RODEOHOUSTON is now in the process of digitizing its enormous, unique, and irreplaceable video archive. Older videotapes are currently located in a warehouse so that editors wishing to use clips from them must drive across the vast expanse of the Reliant Park complex, pull them off a shelf, and run them through a VTR. Once those clips have been incorporated into the DIVAworks system, access will be a mouse click away.

"The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo is one of the nation’s top entertainment events with a keen sense of its cultural and historic heritage," said Mike Knaisch, president and CEO of Front Porch Digital. "To bring its media storage technology into line, the Rodeo initially looked at disk-based systems, but soon recognized the advantages in flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness of DIVAworks."

Front Porch Digital’s DIVAworks is a plug-and-play content storage and protection solution that incorporates a datatape library, LTO-4 datatape drives, and a server running Front Porch Digital’s DIVArchive content storage management software. It was designed to provide a turnkey solution for users in a wide variety of media-related fields.