SOUTH BEND, IND.—Fighting Irish Digital Media is part of the University of Notre Dame’s athletics department and we wanted to provide our Fighting Irish fans around the world a window to our stadium and playing fields. We accomplished this with the launch of the NotreDameAthletics channel on YouTube and now fans and alums anywhere can savor the action and rejoice in a big win via video clips that offer a unique behind-the-scenes perspective and also exclusive interviews with players and coaches.

 

While this initiative has been very well received, there was a downside—the amount of time it took to get content ready and moved on to YouTube; typically two to three hours per event.

THERE HAD TO BE A BETTER WAY

We were looking for a way to speed up the process and discovered Telestream’s Pipeline HD network video capture system and the Vantage Transcode Pro workflow solution. By employing these products we are now able to have game highlights ready for online viewing in only 20 minutes.

During the 2012 football season, games were brought in live to one of our eight channels of Pipeline HD. As soon as Pipeline HD began ingesting the video, and delivering it to our SAN, our editors were able to start their edits and put highlights right onto the timeline, ready for online distribution.

Before adopting Pipeline HD into their gameday workflow, our editors had to wait for the first half of the game to be recorded onto P2 cards, which were then manually shuttled back to their edit stations.

The editors couldn’t begin editing highlights prior to the third or fourth quarter of each game, drastically delaying our online delivery time. Also, the editing was being done on laptop computers and before it could start, the received footage had to be converted to Apple ProRes, the format we use with Apple Final Cut Pro.

In order to increase our productivity, we needed to move this very laborious log-and-transfer process off our laptops and onto beefier hardware. . This is where Telestream’s Vantage and its high-performance processing power entered the picture, streamlining the process, and providing us with the efficient file-based workflow that we needed to speed. things up.

Even though the live program feed could now flow directly into Pipeline HD, we still had to deal with the P2 storage cards, as we send independent shooters armed with Panasonic P2 HD cameras to provide background video to give our viewers a sense of what things are like on game day. Now Vantage is able to automatically transcodes the P2 card content into ProRes and to deliver it our SAN where it’s easily available for our editors to work with.

PICKING UP EVEN MORE SPEED

After the editing process is completed, the ProRes files then are transferred to a Vantage drop folder, with Vantage automatically picking the files up and converting them into the file format that’s needed for our online distribution. The converted files are then placed onto the SAN for uploading.

Since installing Telestream’s Pipeline HD and Vantage Transcode Pro, we now have a cohesive, efficient, user-friendly workflow that requires very little manual intervention along the way from capture to conform. We’re able to relay Fighting Irish highlights to our online fans within minutes of the game and that’s a real win for everyone.

Scott Rinehart is lead technologist for the Fighting Irish Digital Media at the University of Notre Dame. He may be contacted at scott.m.rinehart.12@nd.edu

For additional information, contact Telestream at 877-681-2088 or visit www.telestream.net.