Nine NBN News integrates Bluefish444 IngeSTore Server for News Pre Production with Avid
06 July, 2023
Stephen Bates is a veteran Australian broadcast engineer working at Nine Network NBN News. NBN News is an Australian television station based in Newcastle, New South Wales. The station was the first regional commercial television station in New South Wales. It is owned and operated by the Nine Network, an Australian free-to-air television network, one of the five main free-to-air television networks in Australia.
NBN News delivers the daily news broadcast at 6pm covering the broadcast footprint of Northern NSW. News bulletins are customized to each viewing market using local and national content. NBN News creates news updates and promos throughout the day and content for the NBN News website. NBN News also works with Nine Direct Production who are a full-service production and post-production facility creating TV commercials, online video content, social media content and digital advertising.
Stephen leads the broadcast engineering team who support the News and Post Production systems at Nine NBN. During the past 18 months Stephen’s team has built a new studio facility on the Newcastle harbour side after 60 years at the original NBN studios in Cooks Hill. Nine NBN uses Avid centric broadcast IT infrastructure including Avid Nexis network storage, Avid Media Composer NLE’s and the Avid MediaCentral | Cloud UX media workflow management platform.
For the upgrade at the new studio at Newcastle harbour side, Stephen required a news pre-production system that would fit seamlessly into and work interoperably with their Avid IT infrastructure. Specifically, NBN News needed a solution for SDI ingest of local long form and screen capture content directly into Avid Nexis network storage. This content needed to support a growing files workflow, enabling edit-while-record with the Media Composer NLE systems connected to Avid Nexis storage.
Stephen researched Bluefish444’s IngeSTore Server, a 4 channel centralised ingest appliance that captures live video and audio feeds directly to Avid Nexis in numerous codecs, including many broadcast formats compatible with Media Composer for growing files workflows for live editing.
Bluefish444 agreed with NBN News in early 2021 to install a loaned server with temporary licenses in the new harbour side studio for Stephen to first test the news pre-production workflow. The evaluation took several months looking at performance of the IngeSTore Server, codec support, growing files workflow for Avid Media Composer, the NetAccess web client, and the IngeSTore Libero Scheduler.
The evaluation was successful and NBN News had no hesitation in proceeding to invest in IngeSTore Server. After integration of the IngeSTore Server, NetAccess, and the IngeSTore Libero Scheduler, Stephen wanted to optimise the ingest pipeline and requested support for the XDCAM 35 codec that was previously unsupported by IngeSTore. After an integration period Bluefish added the codec and now includes it as standard in the BlueCodecPack license.
Stephen Bates says ;
“IngeSTore Server is a very cost effective 4 channel ingest solution that has been reliable and easy to use. It integrates with Avid’s Media Composer to allow editing of growing clips directly and they are available to browse once the file is closed in our Avid MCCUX system. The IngeSTore Net Access web browser interface is simple to use from a remote networked workstation allowing us to keep the IngeSTore Server in the data centre.”
The use of Net Access is an ideal workflow for dealing with sensitive gender-specific content as the ingest archive can be monitored from another networked location, and the main viewing screen in the video room can be turned off. AIATSIS finds the Net Access GUI is less flexible and sophisticated than the IngeSTore desktop software, but overall, Net Access has been very straightforward to set up and start encoding. Furthermore, AIATSIS has been able to provide valuable real-world feedback to Tom Lithgow, the Bluefish444 Product Manager for IngeSTore feature roadmap planning.
About the support offered by Bluefish444, Stephen says;
“BlueFish444 worked with us to add customised codec integration to our “house format” to eliminate the need for transcoding. Tom Lithgow the Product Manager has been very helpful with initial troubleshooting support and then delivering us a new build of IngeSTore software with our preferred XDCAM 35 format to save transcoding from XDCAM 50.”
Concerning the IngeSTore feature set and roadmap, Stephen gave Bluefish444 a number of feature requests including support for IngeSTore encoded files to be checked in directly to Avid Media Central. This commonly requested feature and many others are part of the IngeSTore Server product roadmap and a major update is due out in Q1 2023.
