rowan.depomerai

I’m coming to the end of my sixth week on a new project at work, so I thought it about time I said something about it. For the uninitiated, the first 2 years in my job are a ‘training’ period, when I’ll spend time on four different projects for around six months each. This is my second placement, after spending some time with Production Magic.

I’m now working with the Production Automation team on the Ingex tapeless production system. Basically Ingex is a cheap system for recording video to disk drives rather than tape. Believe it or not, almost all broadcast TV is still tape based, (digital tapes, not analogue though!) and moving to a tapeless system is more complicated than you might think. Changing a whole workflow, all of the equipment involved and most crucially the working practices of hundreds of staff is a serious challenge. But as you might imagine, the benefits are substantial, and the BBC is investing huge amounts in making it happen through the Digital media Initiative.

Ingex then, is a system based on off-the-shelf PC hardware and some gnatty software which allows the simultaneous recording of multiple digital video feeds (4 standard definition or 2 high definition feeds per recorder PC, and there can be more than 1 recorder PC) straight to hard disk. It is controlled from an interface which the Production Assistant (PA) can operate to start and stop recording and to enter logging information such as whether takes are good or bad, a process previously done primarily on paper. The system then encodes various versions of the video for online and offline editing as well as browsing via a webpage which is also created automatically. A DVD can even be produced for the production team to view the rushes (raw footage) later. Information is copied to a central file server which is later used to conform the edit, while the offline versions of the video files are sent overnight to post-production facilities. Other features of Ingex include the ability to multicast a quad- or nine-split video feed across a local network so that others can see the output from all cameras. This is useful for those in the production office and the lighting director for example.

The whole Ingex system is open source, and you can read much more details on its Sourceforge page. But where do I fit in? Well Ingex works really well and is becoming a fairly mature product, having been in development for some time. We’ve used it on productions such as Dragon’s Den and Eastenders, and I was lucky enough to help with rigging for the former as well as getting to watch some filming. But there is one rather major problem, which is that the system is very difficult to monitor. It is essentially very modular, and many of the components (the capture processes, the recording and encoding processes etc) have no GUI, so ensuring the system is functioning correctly can involve keeping an eye on many command-line windows, checking error messages and so on. My job therefore is to produce a centralised monitoring (and later perhaps control) interface for Ingex as a whole.

It’s a web-based interface, utilising technologies such as AJAX, Perl, JSON and potentially others such as XMPP to deliver and display information in a format understandable to a fairly non-technical user. When discussing the system with the team I keep talking about big fluffy green and red blobs and other traffic-light style displays. I started by modifying the existing web interface, used for managing recorder configurations and so on, so that it’s more modular and based solely on AJAX rather than page refreshes. This allows me to implement an overall system health icon which automatically updates continuously and is never interrupted by the user loading new pages. I’m now working on implementing the status module and looking at the best ways to deliver information from the various parts of the system to one central place.

That’s an overview, but it’s been a pretty long one so I’ll leave it there for now. Hope it’s of some interest…

This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 11:30 am and is filed under Personal Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.