Sports Production Firm Sunset+Vine Uses Atempo ASG Digital Archive

Atempo, Inc., an ASG company (Allen Systems Group, Inc.), announced
that sports production company Sunset+Vine
deployed ASG Digital Archive (ADA), a file archiving platform, to manage
and preserve HD coverage of sporting events.

Established in 1983, Sunset+Vine is the independent supplier of
popular sports programs to a portion of the biggest broadcasters in the UK. The
company’s main UK production contracts include horse racing for the BBC (The
Derby and The Grand National), NFL for Channel 4, Aviva Premiership Rugby for
ESPN and UEFA Europa League football for Channel 5. More recently, Sunset+Vine
signed a 2-year contract to produce a weekly magazine program leading up to the
34th America’s Cup in 2013.

Tasked with recording HD footage from the America’s Cup World
Series, consisting of 12 worldwide regattas leading up to the 34th America’s
Cup, Sunset+Vine was faced with the challenge of managing and storing a growing
amount of digital data. Over the 2-year contract, the team captured 30 hours of
HD footage from each event, as well as ENG material shot specifically for the
weekly magazine show. Additionally, the team had archived and acquired footage
from news agencies and teams from all over the world, making a total of up to
300TB of data, transcoded in various formats including HD ProRes 422 for
editing and MP4 and AVC-Intra 100 for delivery.

In order to edit the live satellite feed and provide broadcasters
with the footage they need, Sunset+Vine has 100TB of primary storage on Tiger
Technology’s metaSAN and a cloud storage solution from Limelight Networks. However,
taking into account the requirement to preserve HD footage for the long-term,
the increasing costs for the cloud service and reduction in space and
performance of the metaSAN, Tom Bucknall, technical manager at Sunset+Vine, was
faced with finding a file-archiving solution to manage the digital data more
effectively. With help from Digital Garage, a specialist broadcast, post production,
audio and education solutions provider, Sunset+Vine deployed ADA.

"ADA meets the needs of
the America’s Cup project and allows us to centrally manage media files with
ranging levels of access," said Bucknall. "The ability to seamlessly access archived files through CatDV will
enable our production team to work with archived data directly. Digital data
can be easily archived to tape for long-term storage and effortlessly retrieved
when needed, providing significant cost savings and optimizing our existing
storage resources."

Using ADA’s storage management capabilities, Sunset+Vine has the
ability to move America’s Cup footage once it has been edited, from the metaSAN
to a 14TB nearline Axus RAID storage device for temporary archiving and
retrieval. Once the nearline device reaches 10TB capacity, the oldest data is
automatically migrated for long-term preservation to a Spectra T120
LTO-5 tape library, making room for new data and optimizing performance. ADA’s integration with CatDV, Sunset+Vines’s media asset management
solution, enables editors to archive and retrieve their assets via CatDV’s user
interface.

ADA also archives the specific and varying metadata recorded at each
America’s Cup regatta as they take place, including the reel number, cameraman
and date, allowing Sunset+Vine to search and retrieve footage as requested.

"Broadcast and production companies like
Sunset+Vine are faced with data-intensive environments, whereby media rich
files are required to be safely stored for the long-term while remaining easily
accessible for future use," said Hilarius Dressen, GM for ASG EMEA.
"ASG’s ADA is designed to simplify
the data management process and easily integrate into project workflows. It
addresses the growing demand for robust, feature-rich and fully integrated
digital content archiving solutions in the media and entertainment space."