 On
Saturday, December 15, 2001 the AES Singapore Section hosted their
last seminar for the calendar year. A total of 17 audio enthusiasts
comprising of 4 members and 13 guests attended the seminar held at
the World Sports Group (WSG) office located within the RCL
Centre at the central business district along Keppel Road. Nick
Morgan, Technical Operations Manager for World Sports Group’s
international television operations, spoke about the Unity Network that
WSG’s Singapore office, World Sport Television, had recently installed to
improve workflow for their weekly sport television output of soccer,
basketball, golf and other sports programs.
The transition from analog linear
work methods to a non-linear digital environment for television and film
work has been spearheaded by two workstations: the Avid video editing
workstation and digidesign’s ProTools audio editing platform are the
industry leaders in their respective disciplines. After Avid acquired
digidesign, the combined company has been hard at work to create a seamless
environment for video, audio and graphic editors to work without having to
transfer projects from workstation to workstation via conventional media
tapes, each time needing to re-digitize the material in real time. Taking a
leaf from big computer servers that are commonplace in large multi-national
companies, the Unity Network was designed to permit all the workstations to
share material stored on one central server.
Nick Morgan is a 20-year
veteran of the production industry who started in his native New Zealand. He
has worked in live sound, studio recording and television audio editing.
Since moving to Singapore in early 1999, he has made the transition to
technical operations manager and held that position for Sony AXN for several
years prior to joining World Sports Television. As a production company that
produces between 4-7 hours of sports programming every week, as well as
supporting on-air promotional material, the decision was made to install the
Unity Network to make dramatic improvements in workflow efficiencies. WST’s
high demand on the system made it the perfect installation to visit for a
seminar on the system that has or will be installed in 4 locations in
Singapore by the end of 2001.
After refreshments are served, the
usual procedure is that the AES Singapore Section representative who is
chairing the seminar will introduce the speaker and give an outline of the
seminar. AES Singapore Section chairman Robert Soo was in the US on a
business trip, so Treasurer for the 2001 / 2002 term, Kenn Delbridge,
took over these responsibilities. However, Morgan surprised everyone
by standing up and launching into his seminar, complete with a quick
biography on his credentials and an overview of the seminar. Installing a
media server system like the Unity Network requires a lot of technical
coordination and clearly Morgan is used to seizing the initiative and
getting underway with any project.
Having distributed printouts
explaining the layout of the network and the typical flow of a 26-minute
program through the system, Morgan gave a detailed background on the
system before touring the facility. With 3 Avid Media Composers, 1 ProTools
system and a Windows NT-based graphics workstation, the Unity Network was
installed to provide efficient flow of work through the production facility
with the emphasis on the video editing as that was, as Morgan
explained, the most time-consuming.
Shawn Simon, a
digidesign specialist from the US who was in town to help fine-tune the
system for WST, then joined the group. He gave the audience a quick review
of the latest ProTools software release, V5.1.3, the newest compatible
software within the Unity Network. ProTools has a v5.2 release but this, as
Simon explained, was intended for the music-recording environment,
not television sound production. Even though the seminar was on the Unity
Network and its ability to tie together workstations working in the three
areas of video, audio and graphics, a preference was given to the audio
aspect given the background of the attendees.
Once the overall picture of the
facility and the workflow through the system was explained, Morgan
led the group of 17 through to the suites for a real-time demonstration of
the Unity Network. The first stop was an Avid Media Composer suite: with the
assistance of one of his senior video editors, Morgan loaded into a
26-minute sporting program that was video finished and awaiting its audio
mix. With a few keystrokes, Morgan prepped the Avid project for
mixing and sweetening in the ProTools environment.
Then the group walked next door to
the ProTools suite and in the space of less than 10 minutes, Morgan
loaded the 26-minute program into the ProTools workstation, complete with
all relevant time-line information, audio tracks and access to the
non-linear random access digitized video. What was previously at least a
52-minute operation now gave the editorial team barely enough time to make a
quick coffee in the WST kitchen before work could begin at another
workstation. Shawn Simon also demonstrated some of the upgraded
features of the v5.1.3 software for the audio-minded audience.
After treasurer Kenn Delbridge
presented Nick Morgan with an AES appreciation plaque, the group
assembled for a photograph before heading back to the conference room for a
brief Q&A session. The racks holding the Unity Network and its 1.3 TB (1290
GB) of storage were also toured before the seminar was wrapped and the
attendees headed off for Saturday lunch.
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