At iconik, we have the privilege of working with some incredibly innovative partners. THUMBWAR™ is one of them. THUMBWAR specializes in building toolsets to deploy remote workflows for media, especially for organizations in the world of professional sports.
The 2020 World Series presented Fox Sports with new production challenges. They asked THUMBWAR, a longtime partner, to formulate a game plan that would use a hybrid cloud workflow.
- Game footage would have to be available to editors soon after capture.
- A virtualization layer was also needed to enable remote editing.
The solution that was delivered kept the Fox Sports production teams connected as they delivered games to Major League Baseball fans in an unprecedented time.
The Hybrid Cloud Solution Used for the 2020 World Series
A Grand Slam for ENG Workflows
The ENG (electronic news gathering) workflow in iconik was the MVP of this entire hybrid cloud solution. ENG clips are not part of the live broadcast. This footage is filmed on high-end cameras to create great-looking promos and highlight reels later on.
How to Quickly Find 1 of 8000 Videos
This is the workflow that allowed remote editors find ENG clips as they were added to iconik:
- Every bat was recorded from 3 different cameras
- At the end of each inning, camera cards were put into remote card readers with a 10 GB fiber connection to an on-premise NAS
- The NAS used an iconik Storage Gateway (ISG) to generate proxy files
- The video proxies were pushed to the iconik cloud
- An operator added metadata to clips in realtime and added them to saved searches like “hit” or “home run”
With this solution, editors could find every single hit and home run for each game/inning/team/player just by going to an iconik saved search that returned up-to-date content.
“It just worked.” - Trevor Carlson, Vice President Of Engineering at THUMBWAR
From the image above, it’s clear that there were a lot of moving parts to make the 2020 World Series production a hybrid cloud operation. But according to THUMBWAR Founding Partner Brian Carr, The most transformative piece of technology used this year was iconik.
Why Was iconik So Transformative?
It didn’t matter if editors were on-site, at another studio, or in their living room. They all had the media they needed because it was always online in iconik. This saved days of downtime. Before, editors had to wait for technicians to arrive at their location with new content before they could start editing. Now, editors could begin working remotely with media shortly after it was captured.
iconik has shown that it is a great way to manage media during decentralized productions. As THUMBWAR continues to deploy remote workflows for media, iconik will be a part of how it serves its clients.
Infographic data source: sportsvideo.org
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