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This is aimed at directors and editors as well as the media manager and guarantees the quality of the media, which is essential for the films in the collection. It is based on Media Composer Cloud Remote, an Avid solution primarily dedicated to news / sports that France Télévisions engineers have adapted as needed. It is a Media Composer, the Avid editing software, enriched with additional functions dedicated to the exchange of files (dowload / upload) and dedicated services installed locally on the PC. Please note, despite the trade name of this product, nothing is happening in the cloud, everything happens between the remote workstations and the storage of France Télévisions.
The need
For the directors:
A Media Composer Cloud Remote station for editing, titling, recording a voice (voice over) associated with video monitoring (quality monitor, television) and multitrack audio (Artist DNxIQ)
For each of the two editors:
A MediaComposer Cloud Remote station for editing
For the media manager:
A workstation providing access to media to manage and finalize projects. In terms of volume, Apocalypse currently represents 8 TB of media, or around 500 hours of video and 30,000 images, making it the most important documentary project of the France Télévisions group.
For each of these stations, the possibility of exchanging media with the central storage of France Télévisions (upload and download).
Benefits
The solution allows synchronized remote editing.
Concretely, a voice-over uploaded by the directors or an ingest carried out at headquarters by an editor or the media manager in the central storage is made available locally in high definition on all workstations (which makes it possible to continue working in the event of an Internet cut). Upload / download operations are performed in the background and do not impact the editing work. They can be manually interrupted to free up all of the bandwidth.
Still to optimize bandwidth, the media present at headquarters are accessible in streaming in proxy quality (low resolution) for viewing and logging operations.
A secure environment
Every precaution has been taken to ensure media security, starting with remote workstations. They come with ruggedized OS, meaning unnecessary apps and items have been removed. No internet access either. The user directory (AD-SI) is synchronized, only an @ francetv.fr account can open a session. The IT teams intervened to configure the VPN which allows communication with the central storage and authentication (Global Protect). In the event of a problem, they can take control of all the machines remotely.
This project has been in operation since February. The involvement of the various entities of the company (Engineering, IT, Post-production) makes it a real collaborative project.
