Unity ISIS

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Avid Unity ISIS is a storage system for video files used by television broadcasters developed by Avid Technology. ISIS stands for "Infinitely Scalable Intelligent Storage."

Television Telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images

Television (TV), sometimes shortened to tele or telly, is a telecommunication medium used for transmitting moving images in monochrome, or in colour, and in two or three dimensions and sound. The term can refer to a television set, a television program, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertising, entertainment and news.

Avid Technology is an American technology and multimedia company founded in August 1987 by Bill Warner, based in Burlington, Massachusetts. It specializes in audio and video; specifically, digital non-linear editing (NLE) systems, management and distribution services.

Contents

Capabilities

Isis Version 2.0 has 400 megabytes per second of bandwidth for each engine, and 10 gigabit per second connectivity, allowing uncompressed files. 330 clients can use the system at once, with total storage of 384 terabytes, or 196 terabytes capable of being used with mirror mode, [1] meaning that data is always stored twice, but in random locations rather than using specific pairs of drives. [2] This is sufficient for 430 hours of uncompressed HD or 8300 hours of compressed 50-megabyte-per-second HD. [1]

The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Its recommended unit symbol is MB. The unit prefix mega is a multiplier of 1000000 (106) in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one megabyte is one million bytes of information. This definition has been incorporated into the International System of Quantities.

In computing, bandwidth is the maximum rate of data transfer across a given path. Bandwidth may be characterized as network bandwidth, data bandwidth, or digital bandwidth.

The gigabit is a multiple of the unit bit for digital information or computer storage. The prefix giga (symbol G) is defined in the International System of Units (SI) as a multiplier of 109 (1 billion, short scale), and therefore

"Infinitely scalable," according to David Schleifer, Avid vice president for technology and work groups, means that, in theory, storage is unlimited because individual systems can be linked to each other. Each time a new system is added, he says, the data moves from the existing system to the new system in such a way that the two systems have the same amount of information. "Intelligent Storage" refers to advancing beyond the idea that a central server must be accessed each time a file is desired. This type of system limits the number of users at a time. Senior product manager Andy Dale says 16 "blades," or circuit boards, make it possible for many users to access the system at once. [3] The system components—engines, switch blades, storage blades, and power/cooling units—can be changed without work stopping. Individual units can make decisions themselves, improving productivity for the entire system. [1]

In telecommunication a data link is the means of connecting one location to another for the purpose of transmitting and receiving digital information. It can also refer to a set of electronics assemblies, consisting of a transmitter and a receiver and the interconnecting data telecommunication circuit. These are governed by a link protocol enabling digital data to be transferred from a data source to a data sink.

Server (computing) Computer to access a central resource or service on a network

In computing, a server is a computer program or a device that provides functionality for other programs or devices, called "clients". This architecture is called the client–server model, and a single overall computation is distributed across multiple processes or devices. Servers can provide various functionalities, often called "services", such as sharing data or resources among multiple clients, or performing computation for a client. A single server can serve multiple clients, and a single client can use multiple servers. A client process may run on the same device or may connect over a network to a server on a different device. Typical servers are database servers, file servers, mail servers, print servers, web servers, game servers, and application servers.

Blade server type of server computer

A blade server is a stripped-down server computer with a modular design optimized to minimize the use of physical space and energy. Blade servers have many components removed to save space, minimize power consumption and other considerations, while still having all the functional components to be considered a computer. Unlike a rack-mount server, a blade server fits inside a blade enclosure, which can hold multiple blade servers, providing services such as power, cooling, networking, various interconnects and management. Together, blades and the blade enclosure form a blade system, which may itself be rack-mounted. Different blade providers have differing principles regarding what to include in the blade itself, and in the blade system as a whole.

Since broadcasters need their video files at all times in a world of 24-hour news, and since there are more of them needing such access, the ability to retrieve such files instantly is no longer a luxury. Sharing of systems cuts costs and allows data to be backed up in the event a possible problem is detected. [2]

History

Avid Unity ISIS was introduced in October 2005 as a successor to Avid's Unity system, which could hold 20 terabytes for as many as 60 clients. Unity ISIS could hold 64 terabytes and could be used by as many as 100 clients at once. Schleider said content could be retrieved at 50 gigabytes per second, making HD files possible. CBS News planned to use the system as it upgraded to a digital newsroom concept. Competitors at the time with smaller systems included Quantel, Grass Valley and Omneon. [3]

CBS News is the news division of American television and radio service CBS. CBS News television programs include the CBS Evening News, CBS This Morning, news magazine programs CBS Sunday Morning, 60 Minutes, and 48 Hours, and Sunday morning political affairs program Face the Nation. CBS News Radio produces hourly newscasts for hundreds of radio stations, and also oversees CBS News podcasts like The Takeout Podcast. CBS News also operates the 24-hour digital news network CBSN.

Newsroom place where journalists—reporters, editors, and producers, along with other staffers—work to gather news

A newsroom is the central place where journalists—reporters, editors, and producers, associative producers, news anchors, associate editor, residence editor, visual text editor, Desk Head, stingers along with other staffs—work to gather news to be published in a newspaper and/or an online newspaper or magazine, or broadcast on radio, television, or cable. Some journalism organizations refer to the newsroom as the city room.

Quantel was a company based in the United Kingdom and founded in 1973 that designed and manufactured digital production equipment for the broadcast television, video production and motion picture industries. They were headquartered in Newbury, Berkshire.

In January 2007, WBZ-TV in Boston, Massachusetts switched to a tapeless system, using a 64-terabyte ISIS system capable of storing 2200 hours of content. [4]

WBZ-TV CBS TV station in Boston

WBZ-TV, virtual channel 4, is a CBS-owned-and-operated television station licensed to Boston, Massachusetts, United States. The station is owned by the CBS Television Stations subsidiary of CBS Corporation, as part of a duopoly with MyNetworkTV affiliate WSBK-TV. The two stations share studios on Soldiers Field Road in the Allston–Brighton section of Boston; WBZ-TV's transmitter is located on Cedar Street in Needham, Massachusetts, on a tower site that was formerly owned by CBS and is now owned by American Tower Corporation.

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Digital video is an electronic representation of moving visual images (video) in the form of encoded digital data. This is in contrast to analog video, which represents moving visual images with analog signals. Digital video comprises a series of digital images displayed in rapid succession.

Streaming media Continuous multimedia operated & presented to users by a provider other than conventional broadcast media channels

Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a provider. The verb "to stream" refers to the process of delivering or obtaining media in this manner; the term refers to the delivery method of the medium, rather than the medium itself, and is an alternative to file downloading, a process in which the end-user obtains the entire file for the content before watching or listening to it.

Non-linear editing system Form of audio, video, or image editing

Non-destructive editing is a form of audio, video, and image editing in which the original content is not modified in the course of editing; instead the edits are specified and modified by specialized software. A pointer-based playlist, effectively an edit decision list (EDL), for video or a directed acyclic graph for still images is used to keep track of edits. Each time the edited audio, video, or image is rendered, played back, or accessed, it is reconstructed from the original source and the specified editing steps. Although this process is more computationally intensive than directly modifying the original content, changing the edits themselves can be almost instantaneous, and it prevents further generation loss as the audio, video, or image is edited.

Camcorder video camera with built-in video recorder

A camcorder is an electronic device originally combining a video camera and a videocassette recorder.

A distributed data store is a computer network where information is stored on more than one node, often in a replicated fashion. It is usually specifically used to refer to either a distributed database where users store information on a number of nodes, or a computer network in which users store information on a number of peer network nodes.

CamCutter is a digital video camera technology developed by Ikegami and Avid Technology for recording broadcast quality video to hard disk, dubbed a Digital Disk Recorder. First revealed in 1995 at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas, it used a camera mechanism by Ikegami and a special FieldPack unit instead of a tape transport unit. The CamCutter outpaced subsequent tapeless camcorders introduced by Sony and Panasonic by years. In October 2010, the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) announced the recipients of the 62nd Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy® Awards. Ikegami and Avid Technology were announced as a winner for the Development and Production of Portable Tapeless Acquisition. Today's CamCutter technology can be found in Ikegami's Editcam products.

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Uncompressed video is digital video that either has never been compressed or was generated by decompressing previously compressed digital video. It is commonly used by video cameras, video monitors, video recording devices, and in video processors that perform functions such as image resizing, image rotation, deinterlacing, and text and graphics overlay. It is conveyed over various types of baseband digital video interfaces, such as HDMI, DVI, DisplayPort and SDI. Standards also exist for carriage of uncompressed video over computer networks.

The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) is a United States Department of Energy Leadership Computing Facility. The NCCS provides resources for calculation and simulation in fields including astrophysics, materials, and climate research. This research is intended to enhance American competitiveness in industry. The NCCS, founded in 1992 and located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), currently manages a 2.33-petaflop Cray XT5 supercomputer named Jaguar for use in open research by academic and corporate researchers. Jaguar was named the world's fastest computer at SC09, a position it held until October 2010. Founded in 1992, the NCCS is a managed activity of the Advanced Scientific Computing Research program of the Department of Energy Office of Science (DOE-SC).

The National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) is funded by the National Science Foundation and managed by the University of Tennessee. NICS was home to Kraken, the most powerful computer in the world managed by academia. The NICS petascale scientific computing environment is housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), home to the world's most powerful computing complex. The mission of NICS, a member of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, is to enable the scientific discoveries of researchers nationwide by providing leading-edge computational resources, together with support for their effective use, and leveraging extensive partnership opportunities.

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References

  1. 1 2 3 http://www.avid.com/US/products/family/ISIS
  2. 1 2 Moren, Bill (January 2007). "Avid Unity ISIS:The System Offers Real-Time Access to Multiple Users" (PDF). Broadcast Engineering. Archived from the original (PDF) on November 29, 2008. Retrieved 24 March 2009.
  3. 1 2 Ken Kerschbaumer, "ISIS Offers Mightier Storage System," Broadcasting & Cable, October 31, 2005.
  4. ↑ Kerschbaumer, Ken (March 2007). "Triple Play: WBZ, WSBK and WLWC Move to a Tapeless Workflow" (PDF). Broadcast Engineering. Archived from the original (PDF) on November 29, 2008. Retrieved 24 March 2009.
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