Asahi Broadcasting Aomori (ABA), an All-Nippon News Network facility owned by TV Asahi, serving the Aomori prefecture of Japan, is upgrading its digital news production operations to an HD, file-based system from Grass Valley.
The upgrade is among the first such end-to-end digital news production system from Grass Valley installed by a local Japanese broadcaster. The new equipment, which includes Grass Valley EDIUS editing systems and K2 Summit media servers configured as a storage area network (SAN) environment, will help the station's news staff collaborate and create news content faster and more efficiently. It is scheduled to be fully operational and on-air by June 2012.
ABA is now implementing a next-generation news production system based on the Grass Valley K2 SAN and a Grass Valley STRATUS software architecture framework for the ingest, organization and archiving of daily content with proxy data.
Attached to this network will be a series of Grass Valley HDWS 3G Elite, HDWS 3G and REXCEED 750V turnkey NLE systems that feature the latest 64-bit Windows 7 OS, and Grass Valley's EDIUS 6.3 broadcast software to support ABA's shared storage HD editing workflow processes.
The entire news production system, designed and implemented by local Grass Valley engineers, will work with a third-party newsroom computer system from Nishinihon Computer, a major newsroom computer manufacturer in Japan. This system will also control automated news content playout schedules.
The Grass Valley STRATUS collaborative production framework uses the latest version of the Grass Valley K2 Summit (v. 8.0) server platform as the foundation for media clips to be stored, shared and distributed. The K2 Summit media server makes proxy files available to virtually everyone on a network with proper authorization, via this specialized software layer, while also providing the bidirectional bandwidth necessary to move large HD files around a production facility.
