Workflow specialist Marquis Broadcast has sold its first systems into Australia having secured an order for two Medway media exchange systems from Australian broadcasting company, Network Ten.
The Medway systems will be part of a new digital broadcasting environment for Network Ten’s newsroom centres in Sydney and Melbourne where they will enable Omnibus media files to be transferred between Omneon Media Servers and Avid Unity.
“During the initial specification stages of the project, we identified the need for greater integration between components of our broadcasting systems that would allow them to perform efficient media transfers,” said Jason Tuendemann, technology project manager, Network Ten.
“To accommodate this, we wrote a base specification that would enable Omnibus project files to determine the media that would be transferred between the systems.”
To bring this to fruition, Network Ten partnered with Marquis Broadcast to develop Medway for their specific high-level specification. The system enables media files from multiple sources to be transferred easily between a wide variety of vendor platforms, eliminating compatibility issues that frequently occur when media and its associated metadata are moved between target devices.
“Despite the adoption of standards and the rapid onset of convergence in our industry, workflows can still be hampered by tedious and repetitive operations due to file incompatibility,” continued Tuendemann. “Medway is an efficient file format exchange system that helps to eliminate these bottlenecks and improves workflow.”
Operators will import Omnibus Headline EDLs directly onto the Avid timeline along with all associated media files and metadata. Completed sequences will be dragged from the Avid bin to a simple desktop icon for automatic transfer to the transmission server. All transfers will be performed as background tasks irrespective of their file formats, leaving production staff free to concentrate on producing programmes.
