Woodbine Entertainment, Canada’s leading racetrack and owner of the country’s largest archive of horseracing film and video, has deployed Front Porch Digital’s DIVArchive to manage and repurpose tens of thousands of hours of content. The new DIVArchive technology will help facilitate fast browsing and retrieval of audio and video clips, some of it dating back to 1924.
Woodbine’s television operation employs 110 people who produce 11,500 hours of live television every year, most of it for local races, but also thoroughbred and standard bred races from around the world. Since 2006, content has been loaded into the DIVArchive system.
Currently in the works is a long-term plan to make historic material
accessible as well, eliminating the expense of tape and tape maintenance in addition to the complications and delays posed by tape machines. Unlike many broadcasters, Woodbine archives a high percentage of what it produces because it remains of interest to the racing industry indefinitely.
The DIVArchive system is ideal for this environment because it makes it easy to link complex and varied metadata to the content. A thoroughbred breeder looking to generate a future contender with particular attributes may, for example, wish to browse clips of every mare that has won a turf race by more than two lengths on a rainy day. DIVArchive makes this possible.
Woodbine Entertainment’s DIVArchive is interfaced with four Grass Valley M-Series iVDRs, three of them located at the Woodbine production facility in Toronto, and one at the Mohawk racing and production facility located 30 miles away. It is also networked to three Avid Adrenaline NLE suites and two Grass Valley PVS-1108 Profile XP video servers. The network link to the NLE suites means that a producer working on a documentary or similar project can identify and retrieve footage directly from the archive into Avid Adrenaline. Woodbine’s Storagetek SL-500 tape library contains 49 LTO3 tapes (400GB/tape) as well as a disk array of 13x136GB drives for a total of 1.6TB of RAID 5 storage.
For more information, visit www.fpdigital.com.
