StudioBytes Studio Spotlight: Cincinnatti Reds Hit Home Run with EditShare Server

After outfitting their park with a huge scoreboard display and hundreds of LED and fascia boards, the Cincinnati Reds homebase needed a new, more-extensive media management system to efficiently handle the bigger, better data streams.

Dave Storm, the Red's production manager, fills StudioBytes in on the score with the ballpark's new EditShare system and how it preserves and protects the team's legacy.

StudioBytes: How long have you had the EditShare system?
Dave Storm: It was implemented in January of this year, along with our new HD control room and HD displays that we put in our ballpark.

That’s exciting. It must make a huge difference overall…
Oh, it’s wonderful. We had a myriad of different vendors and different types of boards before and now it’s all uniform. It’s just been tremendous for our workflow, and our fans just love it.

What were some of the main factors that went into your decision?
Well, first of all, we needed the most robust system we could find because we were going 1080i HD. The size of our displays demanded we go to the highest resolution possible.

It also had to support a lot of different users simultaneously. We have five workstations pulling from it and then we have six channels of video feeding it at all times…so it had to accommodate a lot of flow.

Finally, it had to integrate with a scoring data system—Dixon Sports, working with Daktronics, developed the software—that would attach metadata to the clips and that metadata had to stay with the clips no matter how we were looking at them, whether it be on our replay system or our Final Cut Pros or just browsing through folders.

EditShare was the one the met all those requirements.

How many users do you have?
There are five editors and then the in-game users, then two clips players and two replay players…a total of about nine users at any one moment.

How are you finding the ease of use?
Once it’s set up, which was pretty easy, it’s invisible, which is huge—it’s completely transparent to the end user. It operates just like
you’re browsing files. And, knock on wood, we still haven’t had any operational problems. Creating new users, setting preferences and
assigning who can access WHAT ASSETS has all been really easy.

How would you describe your unique requirements producing baseball games, different from say commercials and other kinds of productions?
We’re unique in that we have our game day live production, which is about gathering data: multiple camera angles, what’s happening during the game, what the score is, who’s at bat, who’s pitching. So there’s all this data acquisition and logging that happens simultaneously. And then we are preserve that data and use it as materials for years afterwards. So a decision that a game day operator makes on a Wednesday at 9 o’clock…that clip  gets preserved and looked at a million different ways: for commercials, for highlight videos, for the Web. So in that sense it’s a really different business than most other post. Most times, you finish the job, you take it off the hard drive and then you’re done and never see it again. In our case, we’re constantly referring back to what did this player do back in July, how many singles did he have, etc. for decades and decades afterwards.

That must present something of an organizing challenge. How do you manage your archiving?
Within a month we were filling up this drive and we got some pretty serious storage. So that’s been a big challenge and something that we’re still coming to terms with. We have data tape back-ups and we try to keep the best of the best on our live library that we’re pulling from, and then we have our 2nd tier stuff that gets backed up onto data. But the nice thing about having everything logged really well and all the game information captured and tied to the clips is that you can always refer back to it. So, if I’m  missing a shot of a certain pitcher, I can quickly pull it off a shelf and reingest it and it’s right there.

How much data do you capture for a given game?
Well, we record six channels of all these cameras and truck feeds and stuff and then there’s always an ISO to log. So every hit gets captured in six different forms and you’ve got a 3hr game. It’s about 90-100gigs a game easily and that’s just the good stuff you’re saving. Then we also have XD cam disks running all the time. That’s another level of back-up outside the main game feeds, so it’s a lot of media.

How does your new system help with the organizational challenges?
Before, we would capture all this stuff…it would get dumped to a tape…someone would sit down and log it all, figure out what happened,
where it was and then someone would take that log and tape and feed it into an AVID and cut it all up. It was pretty labor intensive. Now, all
those steps happen live while the action’s going on. So, as an editor and as an end-user of that media, you never have to pull a tape off a shelf and figure out what the heck happened and where things are—all that work’s done for you upfront.

What can you see ahead in terms of expanding?
More storage? I love storage. It’s hard to say. In our industry, we’re on the leading edge. We’ve achieved what so many sports teams have  always dreamed about. Yes, there are news organizations and Hollywood studios that could blow us out of the water in terms of size and scale, but nobody in sports has really gotten what we’ve done that I’m aware of. So I don’t know what the next level is. Taking it one step at a time…