Allbritton Communications-owned ABC affiliates KATV in Little Rock, AR, and KTUL-TV in Tulsa, OK, both have chosen the Video Technics Media Archive Library solution to expand their existing NewsFlow ingest, edit and playout systems.
Last year, each station went on the air with twin end-to-end NewsFlow solutions for news via ENPS and master control via Sundance Digital. The systems incorporated four Video Technics Apella LCS Media Servers, VT Proxy Browser embedded in AP ENPS, a VT Database Cluster with instant failover capability, 6TB of RAID-protected NAS and a dedicated VT Media Exchange Server (VTMX) for network file transfers of satellite feeds and Pathfire content.
To provide integrated content creation, the solution incorporated several seats of the VT News Edit plug-in for Final Cut Pro, eight VT Studio Pro NLEs and four NewsFlow field editor notebooks with the VT News Edit plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro.
This month, Video Technics commissioned an end-to-end VT Media Archive Library at KTUL featuring Qualstar’s BQ20/44, which combines a server with an RLS-series robotic tape library.
The 7RU scalable archive solution stores content on a combination of 2TB of hard disk space and barcoded LTO4 tape cartridges. Cartridges can be removed and placed on the shelf, but still be managed by VT’s built-in asset management software.
KTUL produces more than four hours of live news per day and needed a way to archive the clips associated with stories, said Roger Herring, station director of operations. The station generates about 100GB of news content per week that is archived indefinitely. Prior to the addition of the VT Media Archive Library, KTUL archived content in nearline storage straining the station’s budget each time additional storage had to be added, said Baird Carr, KTUL maintenance engineer.
The new archive will hold more than 15TB of storage before a cartridge has to be stored on a shelf. That equates to about three years of media available to be restored from any desktop without having to locate and add a cartridge stored on a shelf, he said.
The VT Media Archive Library for KTUL has 20 cartridge slots, or 1,440 hours of DV25 storage, and a dual-head LTO4 tape drive. It can be expanded to hold up to 44 cartridges as the station’s needs demand.
At KATV, the VT Media Archive Library provides operators with the ability to search the database for archived content, restore it and drag it into a project within minutes without having to go find a videotape and ingest it. That’s important because the station archives about 400 clips per week that have aired or are historically newsworthy, said Allen Finne, station director of engineering. The station has about 50 years of archives, and the new VT Media Archive Library is providing KATV with “an elegant solution” for integrating the archive with its existing newsroom system, he said.
For more information, visit www.videotechnics.com.
