Danish Parliament Votes For SSL Gravity

A state-of-the-art SSL Gravity MAM (Media Asset Management) system coupled to a Snell automation system will be instrumental in bringing Danish Parliament TV to the digital terrestrial network when national digital switchover occurs on November 1 2009.
Selected after considerable consultation and deliberation by contract winner and service provider Studios A/S of Copenhagen, Denmark, Gravity will take feeds from a network of cameras placed throughout the Parliamentary complex and record them to a Gravity Media Network Central Server via six Gravity encoders.
Michael Sjoerslev, Head of Systems integration at Studio A/S, said: "Our task was to find a system advanced enough to meet the demands of the Parliament but yet simple enough to be operated by normal office users.
"The Parliament had quite advanced demands, with a lot of attention to the automated addition of large amounts of different metadata, such as the indexing of speakers through data from the microphone system in the different rooms for instance.
"Another essential point was to have the low-resolution 'proxy' editing clips created and displayed instantly while the high resolution material is still being ingested."
Given the nature of democratic debate, recordings sometimes extend beyond midnight - yet normal video timecode was never designed to accomodate this. Revealing its true MAM credentials, Gravity has been engineered from the outset to handle a change in date within the same clip.
No chances are being taken with data loss either, as each encoder has 24 hours of storage to backup the central storage from Rorke Data integrated with Gravity. The system also has a mirrored off-site disaster recovery store that can be restored on demand.
The rough-cut clips are passed by Gravity Asset browsers to the seven output decoders, at which point Apple Final Cut Pro (FCP) craft editors can create news and highlights packages - all within a tight timescale and at full broadcast quality.
Craft editors can also access and edit media directly via their FCP edit clients and Gravity automatically loads all media clips specified by the Snell automation transmission playlists to the output decoders in the correct format.
Media will be delivered for DVB-T transmission in standard definition and to the internet transmission portal in the MPEG-4 H.264 format by the decoders, which in order to meet the challenge of near-live editing have all been equipped with an on-demand transcode capability. Initially storing media internally in DV25 format, the system can be easily upgraded to HD.
Sjoerslev concluded: "Above all, it was important to find a flexible system, in which the database and storage capacity can be easily expanded as the archive grows." He added that the Gravity system can create a live H.264 video stream for the web TV broadcasts, so saving the cost of external encoders.
Peter Wood, SSL's EMEA Sales Manager for Media Production Systems, said: "We are proud to be part of this ambitious plan to allow the workings of the Danish legislature to be scruntinised by the ordinary voting public in such a comprehensive and timely manner."
Further information is available at: www.solid-state-logic.com.
(KMcA/BMcC)