LOS ANGELES—Editing a documentary requires editors who are organized and who have iron-clad patience to search through and review hours upon hours of footage.

But for a show like “Deadliest Catch,” on which I’ve been a picture editor for the last 14 seasons, these talents are stretched to the limit. Up to 47,000 hours of footage is captured for each season of the show and all those rushes—which include footage from shoulder-mounted cameras shot by camera operators/producers who are on deck with the crab fishermen, as well as multiple fly-on-the-wall mounted cameras from each boat—need to be condensed down into just over 20 hours of finished programming. 

“Deadliest Catch” is the Discovery Channel’s high-octane series that documents fishing vessels in the Bering Sea during Alaskan king crab and snow crab fishing season, which is considered one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. The show has been a fan favorite throughout each of its 300+ episodes in 19 seasons, the latest of which I was honored to be nominated for an Emmy Award.

Rushes Come in 'Waves'
In my work on this show, I work exclusively with Avid Media Composer editing software to turn the hours of footage that make “Deadliest Catch” the suspense-filled show that it is. I work with approximately 10 other editors and together we’re responsible for crafting the daring stories of life on the fishing boats. 

For “Deadliest Catch,” footage comes in waves (pun intended) because the boats are on remote parts of the Bering Sea for weeks or months at a time. That means we’ll be editing earlier episodes of a season while the season is still being documented and footage is still being shipped back as we only get the rushes once the camera operator/producers come ashore.

The unpredictable nature of the job and the delay in receiving rushes means changes need to be made to episodes already in the edit­—the death of Captain Phil Harris late in season six for example. An unexpected event that happened in the middle of a stint at sea, we were told that we’d soon be receiving footage of his death. We went back to previous episodes to line up what was coming. It made us look at older rushes, considering using things that before his death seemed unimportant but afterwards felt significant. 

Editing Flexibility
In any season we use a lot of different features that help us turn the huge amounts of footage into the episodes that you see on TV. While I edit, I’ll mark up clips in our edit bins with locators that do a few things; reminding us to request other angles of something that happened on board or flag something as a good shot that I might want to use later. 

As a team of editors, we also narrow down bins to only show unreferenced clips to our advantage. Seeing only clips that haven’t already been used means we don’t accidentally double up on musical cues in any season. 

I’ve had the pleasure of working on “Deadliest Catch” for so long and I love seeing how the stories have continued to engage audiences with each season; not only that but I’ve also been lucky enough to have already received an Emmy for my work on the show. But none of that would be possible without the incredible job that the whole production team does bringing us this mountain of footage from which to craft these stories. 

For more information visit www.avid.com. 

OTTAWA—In 2015, Discovery’s process of producing programming was overdue for a fundamental overhaul. The company was relying on a mix of tape-based workflows and physical media delivery that was anything but standardized across the enterprise–and it was causing problems.

For instance, although Discovery’s U.S. facility had standardized on receiving content using LFTS-formatted LTO data cartridges (Linear Tape File System/Linear Tape-Open), other Discovery regional facilities were using their own file delivery systems. Discovery’s various facilities even differed on whether content suppliers had to provide the network with broadcast-ready or master-quality video files; the latter being formatted in whatever frame rate the content producer had selected.

This lack of standardization was costing Discovery time and money. This is why the network selected software from SDVI, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based provider of content management software to standardize its content acquisition and creation workflow over IP. The company’s Rally next-gen, cloud-based media supply chain platform gives Discovery’s many content providers a central point to submit their content, in line with the network’s file standards. Having made this happen, SDVI’s Rally now gives Discovery a fast, effective, end-to-end solution to serving out content to cable, satellite, and the web, as well as a way to spin new program streams and even channels.

[Read: ‘Deadliest Catch’ Lands In The Cloud]

Discovery is just one example of a traditional broadcaster/media company that has adopted what the industry refers to as a “next-gen media supply chain” to speed up and rationalize its content creation workflow. Sinclair Broadcast Group (SBG) is another: They are using Imagine Communications’ Versio platform, EPIC MV, SelenioFlex File, and Nexio Motion to provision SBG’s KidsClick children’s programming block to SBG TV stations. Meanwhile, Disney/ABC is using Verizon Digital Media Solutions’ evolved delivery platform and Broadcast/OTT Solution to prepare all of their content for online distribution; with sufficient flexibility to allow ABC affiliates to insert viewer-targeted local advertising quickly and easily.

THE NEXT-GEN ADVANTAGE

In a traditional media supply chain, content is either created or received—or both—at a broadcaster/media company, and then packaged using production hardware and software that is dedicated to the company’s existing playout channel(s) on their physical premises. If a new playout stream needs to be added or a new channel spun up, an entirely new physical production workflow needs to provisioned; machines, personnel and floor space are included.

In a next-gen media supply chain, all of this functionality is provisioned using software and commodity computer hardware; just add servers and stir. Move it into the cloud, and a third-party provider like Imagine, SDVI, or Verizon can handle all of the details. All the broadcaster/media company has to do is to interact with the software (which can be stored in the cloud or loaded onto their own on-premises servers) to format their content as they see fit, and then play it out to a linear delivery system (broadcast./cable/satellite), or serve it directly to the viewer via OTT online.

LAUNCHING NEW CHANNELS QUICKLY

With access to a next-gen media supply chain, broadcasters/media companies can spin new channels up and down as quickly as opportunities dictate.

In the case of SBG’s KidsClick and Imagine Communications, making this happen required some initial customization to serve the varying needs of SBG’s many local stations. But once this work was done, “it was really just an exercise of pointing at the cloud, requesting the required resources, and validating that they’re available and match your requirements,” said Brick Eksten, Imagine’s CTO of Playout & Networking. “We do this for this particular customer three times a day.”

Being able to spin up new channels virtually in the cloud is obviously far more economical than building an entirely new physical plant to produce and distribute them. But the savings can go even further. For instance, at Verizon Digital Media Services, “we only charge you based on the number of viewed content hours,” said Jason Friedlander, the company’s senior director of Product Marketing. “This approach enables our customers to experiment with new strategies and test what works in the market; if no one is watching, you don’t pay.”

SOLVING DISCOVERY’S PROBLEMS

At Discovery, SDVI’s Rally platform is a key part of the company’s global, scalable, and automated media supply chain. “Over the past three years we’ve worked to rebuild our supply chain, transitioning from physical media and fixed assets to a flexible, cloud-based model,” said Josh Derby, vice president, technology development & strategy at Discovery.

According to Derby, moving to a next-gen media supply chain has provided three key benefits to Discovery.

First, “the inherent scalability of Rally and of the public cloud has allowed us to improve the throughput of our supply chain,” he said. “This week we celebrated the upload of the 100,000th asset through our front-end supply chain, a milestone we hit within just two years of our launch. Earlier this year, that supply chain seamlessly absorbed over 20,000 additional assets in just four months as we quickly brought content from our new networks into the supply chain.”

Second, moving to a next-gen media supply chain has allowed Discovery to incorporate “a tremendous amount of automation into our workflows,” Derby said. “We are no longer reliant on having our logistics staff shepherd content through the supply chain. In our Rally supply chain, the assets find their own path through the workflow based on the system’s ability to constantly evaluate and re-evaluate the asset metadata and the results of previous workflow steps.”

Thirdly, adopting a next-gen media supply chain has standardized content acquisition and handling across Discovery’s entire operation. “The new supply chain lets us have a truly global media factory,” said Derby. “Regardless of whether it’s an episode of ‘Deadliest Catch’ airing in the US or an episode of ‘House Hunters’ going to Poland, the content comes through the same supply chain. It’s checked against the correct standards, converted to the necessary file format, and delivered to its correct destination based on metadata from our business systems, allowing us to give each region the files it needs while maintaining a single global media pipeline.”

Next-gen media supply chains have the power to revolutionize content creation workflows, according to Lawrence Kaplan, president and CEO of SDVI. “The fact that they can speed up the rollout of new channels is just the beginning: Next-gen media supply chains can fundamentally improve the ways in which broadcasters and media companies prepare, playout, and distribute their content worldwide.”

A few years ago, the thought of running a TV channel’s infrastructure on a public cloud was considered abhorrent to many broadcasters. The cry was, “not reliable, not secure, no direct control.”

Brinton Miller

In 2017, things have changed with the likes of Discovery, Disney, Fox, Hearst Television, PBS and others making big cloud moves. Discovery has recently announced they are moving their worldwide channel signal chains to the public cloud. This is big news for our industry and is a proof point of cloud acceptance.

Below is an interview with Brinton Miller, senior vice president of technology strategy and architecture for Discovery Communications. I have known Brinton for many years and have followed Discovery’s move to the cloud.

Al Kovalick:Please tell us about Discovery’s channel empire.
Brinton Miller: Discovery Communications offers a portfolio of premium nonfiction, sports and kids programming brands, reaching 3 billion viewers across pay-TV and free-to-air platforms in more than 220 countries and territories. Our programming [like “Deadliest Catch”] is supplied across hundreds of linear channels worldwide.

Kovalick:What are some of your motivations for moving Discovery’s broadcast workflow chains, including playout, to the cloud?
Miller: Eighteen months ago, we started looking at our global media infrastructure and started thinking about what’s next. We had multiple facilities around the world all running aging playout infrastructures. So, planning for a refresh we needed to ask: “Where do we want to be in a few years? Will any infrastructure we build today meet our future business needs, some of which are unknown? With the speed of technology change, does it make sense to spend the next three years building data centers around the world?”

It quickly became clear that we needed to move to a software-based environment and we wanted to build it in a public cloud. We needed to normalize our technology stack so the tools and systems we use to launch linear products were the same as for our nonlinear products.

“Deadliest Catch” crew members of the Cape Caution emptying a crab pot.

Kovalick:How do you put a price on cloud agility when you do an ROI analysis for new infrastructure?
Miller: Agility is a bonus and not a cornerstone of our financial analysis. That said, a cloud-based channel can be built from scratch and be on air in 20 minutes. Sure, content needs to be prepared, but building the on-air chain is fast.

This compares to about four months using current on-premise methods. Agility allows Discovery to quickly deploy pop-up or digital channels to meet new business needs.

Kovalick:What is your legacy equipment utilization across ingest processing, asset management, file delivery, QA, playout and other workflow components?
Miller: Let’s just say that it is nowhere near 100-percent utilization as measured across a 24-hour/day week. Cloud provides the ability to pay for what we use versus building to a ceiling that will ultimately be a bottle neck for the business.

Kovalick:Did you encounter an internal army of naysayers when your technical staff made the cloud transition proposal?
Miller: Not at the management layer. If a cloud-native competitor is doing this, why can’t Discovery? We have a great culture at Discovery that embraces change. There will always be people that take a bit longer than others. However, for the most part the team embraced the idea.

Most of the negative comments came from incumbent equipment providers. They want to sell us boxes and we were not interested in that discussion. I do think that the vendor space is a bit more open to discussing now 18 months later.

Kovalick:What are some of the challenges to the cloud move?
Miller: Licensing of software can be problematic. Most vendors are in the perpetual license business and this model is aging fast. We wanted “per-widget” consumption models whenever possible.

That said, we needed to accept it for some cases. It was also a challenge to duplicate the real-time signal flow portions of video workflows on a cloud platform not specifically designed for video, but we did it and with the same reliability our business requires.

Kovalick:Did you consider starting with only a few cloud-based channels then migrating others later?
Miller: If you are considering migrating to the cloud, don’t dabble in it. Go all in.

Kovalick:Where did you find savings?
Miller: Oh, many places. Equipment maintenance, support, real estate costs, power, cooling, building services, the list goes on. Our legacy air chain had about 130 racks of on-premise equipment just for our 32 domestic feeds. The cloud-based system has five racks on premise and all the remaining in the cloud. All this amounts to tangible savings for the long-term. Of course, we do channel stat-muxing and satellite up-linking outside of the cloud.

To check out our recent webinar, “Project On-Ramp: Migrating Discovery’s Media Supply Chain to the Cloud,” visit www.tvtechnology.com, click on Webinars under “Resources.”

Kovalick:Let’s talk channel reliability, a huge concern for broadcasters. Can you share some of the architectural principles you followed?
Miller: Our initial rollout is based on Amazon Web Services (AWS). We use S3 for object storage and hundreds of EC2 compute instances for media processing and other functions.

The end-to-end workflow is a mix of file-based processing and real-time streams. We worked with selected vendors to implement a world-class broadcast software architecture.

For reliability, each channel’s signal chain is duplicated in two different Regions (AWS U.S. East Region and Dublin, Ireland Region, for example) and each Region’s signal output is fed to our Sterling, Virginia Broadcast Center where they connect to a simple 2x1 switch. It is there we decide which Region’s feed goes to air. If one faults, we switch to the other. We have created a very reliable system that can withstand both geographical disruptions and multiple equipment failures.

Kovalick:Why did you choose AWS?
Miller: Amazon did a good job reaching out to our industry and this built our confidence and trust in their ability to support our workflows and business needs. We built our foundational flows on Linux and virtualization so that we can migrate to other cloud providers if and when it makes business sense. We deliberately applied design principles to not impede any future migrations.

Kovalick:What new vistas has the cloud opened to you?
Miller: There are many, but I like programmatic workflows and supply chain efficiencies. Quickly setting up signal chains and apps as required by a business and rapidly changing these to meet our needs is very cool.

Al Kovalick is the founder of Media Systems consulting in Silicon Valley. He is the author of “Video Systems in an IT Environment (2nd ed).” He is a frequent speaker at industry events and a SMPTE Fellow. For a complete bio and contact information, visitwww.theAVITbook.com.