COCKEYSVILLE, Md.—At Sinclair, Sony’s Ci Media Cloud serves as a central component in our operational workflow, supporting various tasks across multiple departments including master control, traffic, programming, news, sports and engineering. Currently, more than 5,000 users across Sinclair rely on Ci, making it part of daily operations for more than 80% of our staff.

Sony Ci has been deployed so widely at Sinclair because of its intuitive user interface, which requires little training and provides a solid set of fundamental features that can be applied to many different workflows. From a user’s perspective, this reduced complexity results in less time spent in training and faster user adoption. We’ve frequently found our users can apply these tools to create solutions specific to their individual needs without the need to engage technical staff.

Send and Receive
For instance, Ci provides features to receive and send files, send file requests and file links, view proxies, add or change metadata, and search. These basic functions can be linked and arranged to support very different workflows. These may include enabling stringer contributions for high school football, contributions from our own news crews in the field, or reception of commercial spots and syndicated programming from various production houses.

These features are made even more powerful because most are also available via API. We’ve made extensive use of this capability to automate search, modification and movement of files through integration with other systems, including various workflow and orchestration engines. Systems as diverse as production asset management, channel playout, traffic and title management interact with Sony Ci thousands of times a day at Sinclair. Ci’s API event reporting is so granular that we’ve built dashboards in business reporting tools that track and assign cost to specific events and user actions. This contributes to Sinclair’s core philosophy of being a data-driven business.

Ci also subscribes to one of our fundamental design tenets: media and metadata should be independent of applications, such as media asset management. In the past, MAM systems would ingest media after it was often more than less locked in the MAM tool.

Windows Into Storage
We subscribe to the MovieLabs 2030 vision in which services come to the media, rather than the other way around. We believe media and metadata (in the form of “sidecars”) should be available directly in shared storage. We design architectures in which multiple systems simultaneously access media from shared storage.

Sony Ci integrates nicely within this architecture and sits on top of storage that we control, populated with media by other systems, which is destined for use by even more systems. In essence, Ci provides a window into this shared storage, giving users and automation the ability to search and view media and adjust metadata. These actions, in turn, control or trigger additional workflows by yet other systems downstream.

Our media supply chain, which we call the Cloud Media Pipeline (CMP), processes, on average, 30,000 files per week. Sony Ci is an integral component of the CMP.

The flexible and intuitive nature of Ci proved invaluable during an event, which required us to activate our own disaster recovery plans. Users across the organization were able to apply Ci in ways we had not considered as they worked through recovery. In our opinion, this was due to both the intuitive Ci user interface and Ci’s cloud-native architecture. In our experience Ci, as a product, is clearly focused on providing a tool that can solve many problems, as opposed to being hyper- and inflexibly designed around a single use case.

Overall, Sony Ci functions effectively in a wide range of operational contexts, providing a versatile solution for media management across Sinclair’s distributed infrastructure.

More information is available at cimediacloud.com.

Sony has announced new details about how the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) is using Sony’s Ci Media Cloud platform to streamline its workflows and speed up their production processes. 

Sony and NHRA reported that the NHRA's content teams regularly ingest hours of weekly race footage, securely share and remotely edit files with teams nationwide and then deliver final assets to multiple platforms, partners, and networks – all under tight deadline pressures, the companies explained. 

To handle the high volume of content, the NHRA chose Ci for its on-site and cloud-based workflows.

“We want everyone to have the right tools to do their jobs efficiently and get our content out as quickly as possible,” said Rob Hedrick, technical operations manager and senior director of production for the National Hot Rod Association. “Sony Ci is the uniting space where everybody can go to store, edit and share assets, securely and quickly.”

The NHRA team handles all production and distribution for its regular weekly TV programming, including 20 national events as part of the “Mission Foods Drag Racing Series” that airs on Fox Sports, plus an average of eight broadcasts on the FOX broadcast network, as well as shoulder programming, divisional and regional events. The team serves its NHRA TV OTT subscribers, multiple content delivery platforms and social media channels.

Their workload also includes managing content for in-venue experiences, post-production shows like “NHRA in 30” and the “Lucas Oil Sportsmen series” and “Pro Mod” series, as well as ongoing marketing, promotional and archival content and a robust FAST channel where fans can watch content from the inception of the sport in 1951, the NHRA explained. 

The team manages at least three simultaneous productions during every racing event. That translates to about four terabytes of content at each event, with anywhere between eight to 12 hours of video from as many as 50 cameras connected via fiber, wireless or directly to the cloud, and the cameras shooting content exclusively for social media.

Annually, the amount of content created by the NHRA production teams ranges between 600 to 900 hours – and every bit of that content funnels through Ci.

“We’re dealing with multiple days’ worth of multiple hours of event footage,” said Megan Sewell, director of post-production for NHRA. “Ci lets us break it all down and organize it by the different runs, special events or scenics [a track or surrounding area]. We have to produce multiple cut-down versions within 24 hours of an event, and we are able to put those together almost immediately. It's work that we couldn't do without Sony Ci.”

Sewell recalled multiple examples of Ci saving the production team valuable time at high-profile moments. For example, following each year’s final event, NHRA champions are announced and then recognized at an awards ceremony the next day with each champion celebrated with a one- to two-minute video highlight reel.

“Using Ci, we're able to upload Sunday’s files immediately, turn them around to create those videos overnight and have them ready for Monday,” she said.

With audiences on all platforms now accustomed to on-demand content, the Ci platform’s MediaLog app also saved the NHRA social media team at least 90 minutes of work following each event, the companies explained. 

“Timeliness is everything since we're constantly pushing content and updates out to our fans,” said Nykki Schele, senior social media manager at NHRA. “Before Ci, I would have to go to the TV truck with a hard drive to get clips at the end of the night. Now, whether I am in the media room, in the pits, or at the top end of the racetrack, I can access content and get it out to our social channels immediately.”

In addition, Ci makes clipping longer-form pieces into shorter social-friendly files easy and fast, and also helps remote teams and different departments share files seamlessly, the companies reported. 

“We're often creating pieces on the social side that the TV or in-venue teams would like to use,” Schele said. “We can dump everything into Ci, push it out to multiple departments at once, and everyone has access to the same videos, which is super helpful.”

The NHRA also reported that using a cloud-based platform like Ci eliminates the need for NHRA to maintain large on-premises storage pools in its offices, especially with most people working remotely or out of multiple offices. Editors, directors, announcers, and producers are all located in different cities, but everyone is able to view everything, assemble a show, check the timing, make approvals, and then send it to its final destination. 

With such a distributed team, the flexibility in how NHRA can set up separate spaces for different teams in Ci is a significant benefit. The ability to create and assign different Workspaces for various workflows and the ability to quickly share access to footage with remote team members enhances productivity.

“I can easily communicate with my producer in California or a track in Saint Louis asking for video,” Sewell said. “Ci’s cloud-based transferring and storage makes our communication so much better.”

NHRA started using Ci in 2017 and has since continually expanded its use of the platform’s capabilities: uploading, storing, feeding in live streams, logging timecodes of key moments, and delivering; automating its ingest and upload processes; storing a 75-year library of archival footage, sharing between departments; and fully taking advantage of field-to-cloud workflow.

“We quickly realized how important and efficient it is to have a digital asset solution that can be used in a quick and high-functioning capacity,” said Stephen Reintjes, vice president of broadcasting for the NHRA. “We spent the first few years exploring its features and potential, and now there's no turning back for us. It's an ongoing process and to even suggest that we’ve scratched the surface of what Ci can do is an understatement.”

Sony and NHRA's tech teams also reported that when NHRA first started using Ci, the potential storage, time, and cost savings were immediately clear. They evaluated other on-premises storage options that wouldn't have been able to contain half of the content currently stored in Ci -- and would have cost millions more over the long term.

Reintjes noted that Ci’s automated storage management policies allows NHRA to create policies that push content into archive storage and then further down into S3 Glacier-based archive storage based on a pre-determined number of days, months or years.

NHRA’s annual race schedule typically has the same events occurring at the same times of year. The association established a rule that at 400 days races are pushed into archive storage and then at 800 days pushed further into deep archive storage, allowing NHRA to effectively manage its storage costs without having to keep as much content in active storage, the companies said. 

“In every way, Ci is really the heartbeat for the back end of our entire production workflow,” said Hedrick. “Having it as part of our entire process to automate our full production workflow helps us to work more efficiently, deliver content quickly and be better storytellers.”

GLENDORA, Calif.—The National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) is the sanctioning body for the largest motorsports organization in the world and our goal is to provide a safe environment for drag racing.  On the television production side, where I work, we aim to deliver engaging racing action to our fans and viewers on Fox, in-venue, through our OTT platform and on our multiple content delivery platforms and take this content through post production.

I make sure everyone on our content team has the tools to do their job efficiently and effectively, to get the content out as quickly as possible.  One of the key pieces of our process is Sony’s Ci Media Cloud, a cloud-based solution, which allows for collection, backup, review and streamlining of media workflows.

The NHRA has a vast library of archival content, and each race generates between 4 and 5 terabytes of content that result in upwards of 600 to 800 hours of programming annually.  Because of this, we knew we were going to need a large asset management system to store all of our content and deliver it effectively.  We also sought a system that could be accessed from on-site in our edit workflow and our cloud-based workflow.

A ‘Swiss Army Knife' for the Cloud
We ultimately chose Ci because it allowed all of our assets to be managed in the cloud and we didn’t have to keep on prem storage.  We also quickly found that the cost savings associated with Ci were tremendous. Furthermore, in unison with Amazon Web Services storage, Ci allows us to create storage management policies that push content into the S3 Glacier and then down into Deep Archive at regular intervals.

The NHRA is responsible for producing between 20 and 24 events a year, and we have upwards of 30 cameras on site. Each camera is connected via fiber, wireless or directly to the cloud and we get that data back to our users quickly and efficiently.  The camera-to-cloud workflow in Ci means we can rapidly get assets from our multiple cameras back to Ci and ready to be used by our content team.

We also use Ci to automate ingest and upload. Camera feeds are recorded in EVS and files are exported by the Xfile and then sent to a NAS location that is set up as a watch folder in Ci Relay, which uses transfer acceleration and bandwidth management to automatically upload files to the right locations in Ci, giving us instant access when we need them.  Making our content available to our editors with speed and ease allows us to deliver the experience that our fans expect, whether it’s televised or on our social platform.

Live Streaming With Ci
In addition, we’re live streaming 10–12 hours a day to our fans.  Every bit of that funnels through Ci, making it easily available for our social team, marketing team and sales team to go in and look at anything that’s been on our OTT or on television.  They can grab it for a proof of performance, send it to a marketer to show what we’ve done for them on-air or get it to our cloud-based editing team so they can turn it around and create new assets that are ready for the next show nearly instantaneously.

Ci really is the heartbeat for the backend of our entire production workflow, whether it’s providing the storylines in the television show, an item on social media, a regular post or something that marketing can use to sell tickets.  

More information is available at www.cimediacloud.com.

PARAMUS, N.J.—Sony Electronics has expanded the feature set of its Ci professional media management and collaboration platform to include enterprise asset management.

Using Ci Catalog, media enterprises can build and securely manage centralized libraries of rich media. Ci Catalog makes it possible for organizations to make assets available to stakeholders throughout the enterprise, Sony said.

Adding Ci Catalog to the platform’s overall capabilities means Ci now delivers secure content management from production through monetization in a single platform. Using one solution to manage content across an enterprise saves time and money, reduces security concerns, increases collaboration and offers transparency and visibility into an organization’s content, the company said.

“The release of Catalog is a direct response to feedback we’ve received from some of the world’s largest and most recognizable media companies,” said Theresa Alesso, pro division president of Sony Electronics.

Ci Catalog seamlessly integrates with Workspace, Ci’s production and post-production workflow for remote acquisition, media processing and collaboration, the company said.,

A Software-as-a Service (SaaS) platform, Ci accelerates file transfers, enables collaboration, review and approval, provides asset management and delivers transcoding and archiving with one subscription. Its REST APIs enable third-party application and workflow integration, Sony said.

The platform, which enables users to access assets quickly from virtually anywhere, is offered on a pay-as-you-go basis that scales with the needs of media enterprises.

Sony has released a video describing how Ci Catalog and Workspace work together.

More information is available on the company’s website.

LOS ANGELES—My entertainment team at Fullscreen is responsible for creating social media content for our TV and entertainment clients. My team consists of creative producers, account managers, graphic designers, animators and video editors, like myself. Our clients send us TV episodes, and from that we create social media content ranging from animated gifs to video clips to build fan awareness on the social channels for that series.

As our team started handling more video content, we were faced with a new technical challenge—an emerging need for proxy files that preserved the audio of the source file. We reached out to Sony and learned their Ci solution could automatically transcode proxy files at the time of upload. We provided our specifications and Sony’s Ci team was able to produce the custom transcode we needed for every file uploaded to Ci.

SHAVES OFF TRANSFER TIMES

Sony also offered built-in Aspera integration which allowed our Account team to accelerate uploading when dealing with the large source files from clients. Fullscreen has an office in Playa Vista, Ca., but like most of our team, I usually work from home in Los Angeles while my account manager is in New York. We all rely on our home internet connection and online communication to work. When our clients send us 70 GB files, the tools we used in the past would force us to download whole files to our desktop—taking time and hard drive space. In our fast-paced weekly TV workflow, being able to use Ci with Aspera Connect coupled with the availability of smaller transcode files really helps us shave off file transfer times and local storage requirements.

The other feature that intrigued us was Ci’s RoughCut application—the feature I use the most. Once footage is uploaded to our Ci Workspace, the Accounts team gives me the basic timecodes and a direct link to the episode file in Ci. I can download the full episode but often I open Ci’s RoughCut application and start clipping timecodes in order to download a shorter clip. Using RoughCut allows me to quickly download a small three-minute clip assembly of the timecodes I need instead of a full 40-minute episode, which I then import into Premiere or After Effects for editing.

While a lot of requests come with guidelines and a storyboard, having access to the full source footage gives more creative freedom to me as an editor to create a more powerful cut. Whether you’re an animator or an editor, anybody who works as a technical creative will be very familiar with Roughcut.

Across Fullscreen, we have 12-14 Workspaces categorized by various teams and the Workspaces are set up in folder structures based on clients. On my first day of using Ci, it only took 10 minutes for me to learn how the the Workspaces were organized and how to use the features like RoughCut.

Ci makes my workflow a lot easier and not having to download full episodes saves a lot of time and space on my hard drive. It’s a useful step in our weekly episodic workflow that I enjoy using every week, and even find myself telling other people on my team about Ci.

At Fullscreen, Britne Goldstein creates social media content for top entertainment clients. She can be reached atbritne.goldstein@fullscreenmedia.com.

For more information, please visitwww.sonymcs.comor call 800-538-7550.