National Geographic Digital Media has selected and installed the VideoBank media asset management system for its thriving National Geographic Digital Motion footage business. The VideoBank system, which is being used to manage National Geographic's vast collection of programming, simultaneously captures three formats of video: uncompressed 10-bit digital video for highest-quality deep archive, 26MB MPEG-2 for standard broadcast delivery and 1.5MB MPEG-1 for logging applications.
Two VideoBank ingest encoder workstations capture the uncompressed MPEG-2 and MPEG-1 video formats into a Fibre Channel SAN storage system. This 35tb server, supplied by SGI, is a staging area for the VideoBank transcoders to convert the high-resolution video into distribution-ready formats. The high-resolution material is then migrated to a 750TB Sony PetaSite digital tape archive.
VideoBank logging stations allow National Geographic to select and assign attributes to clips during the archive process so they can easily be searched and retrieved as necessary. The VideoBank Playlist Producer provides broadcast-quality digital playout. With VideoBank's Web Playlist tools, multiple Web-based users can create, store and retrieve frame-accurate video sequences created from the video archive assets. An administrative module permits simple control over user profiles and database settings. For more information, visit www.videobankdigital.com.
