Bitcentral

[H4UL4U 127]

The station I work for eventually will be switching to Bitcentral for news video editing. I'm not sure what all programs we'll be getting as they offer quite a few, but it will be replacing Grass Valley Stratus and Edius as well as the K2 Summits (servers) used for ingest of footage from the field, from feeds, and playout through the control room. Bitcentral seems to be pretty standard nowadays. Currently footage edited on a timeline is sent via FTP to the playout servers, and I'm certain this workflow is going to get streamlined. Anybody have any first-hand experience with Bitcentral? Does it suck, or is it good?    

[PTVNews 194]

The stations I've worked at within the past few years all had Bitcentral products. Oasis is the main software used to store/browse ingested/archived content.  Depending on the how Oasis is set up, it can make content sharing within a station group really easy as you can go in and request another station's archived video easily. The Media Encoder app is used to record your station's internal video sources. I don't think Bitcentral itself has an editing software as the stations I've been at used either Avid, Premiere, or Edius.

[who?cares 254]

It has its quirks like every program but it is one of the easier systems I’ve used. 

[H4UL4U 127]

10 hours ago, PTVNews said:

I don't think Bitcentral itself has an editing software as the stations I've been at used either Avid, Premiere, or Edius.

They do. It's called Create, and it's cloud-based (like how pretty much everything is going). I have a hunch we will buy Precis to get rid of ENPS.

[who?cares 254]

30 minutes ago, H4UL4U said:

They do. It's called Create, and it's cloud-based (like how pretty much everything is going). I have a hunch we will buy Precis to get rid of ENPS.

Create is a very basic editor. You almost will have to have something else to edit. Précis is a playout server, not a newsroom system. 

[H4UL4U 127]

13 minutes ago, who?cares said:

Create is a very basic editor. You almost will have to have something else to edit. Précis is a playout server, not a newsroom system. 

Good to know. I've noticed a lot of Bitcentral's product pages have a lot of buzzwords that make it hard to understand exactly what each one does, LOL.

[StandbyStandby 1]

I've seen Precis used at other stations. Didn't allow for pooling of video - it talked to the playout decks as if a TD was controlling it. This was a few years ago, so things may have changed. 

[H4UL4U 127]

To my slight surprise, as part of the switch all of the photogs and couple reporters who MMJ are exchanging their P2 cards for SD cards that will require adapters to work with our cameras. While cheaper, SD cards are less robust and prone to getting lost. 

[H4UL4U 127]

The racks are in and will go live in about a month! The products we are getting Core, Precis, and Media Encoder.  To my real surprise, the new playout servers that are controlled by the control room switcher are not IP based like the outgoing Grass Valley stuff. 

[Eat News 4745]

8 hours ago, H4UL4U said:

The racks are in and will go live in about a month! The products we are getting Core and Media Encoder.  To my real surprise, the new playout servers that are controlled by the control room switcher are not IP based like the outgoing Grass Valley stuff. 

 

Were you guys having significant latency or delay issues with the GV playout , or was all your playout still local or on-site?

 

I'm asking because I want to understand delay factors on the cloud based realtime playout and storage. ..User level experiences as opposed to sales crap and engineering specs.

[H4UL4U 127]

1 hour ago, Eat News said:

 

Were you guys having significant latency or delay issues with the GV playout , or was all your playout still local or on-site?

 

I'm asking because I want to understand delay factors on the cloud based realtime playout and storage. ..User level experiences as opposed to sales crap and engineering specs.

It's all local and on-site. Never experienced any delay or latency issues with playout.

[rkolsen 1684]

11 hours ago, H4UL4U said:

The racks are in and will go live in about a month! The products we are getting Core and Media Encoder.  To my real surprise, the new playout servers that are controlled by the control room switcher are not IP based like the outgoing Grass Valley stuff. 

 

2 hours ago, Eat News said:

 

Were you guys having significant latency or delay issues with the GV playout , or was all your playout still local or on-site?

 

I'm asking because I want to understand delay factors on the cloud based realtime playout and storage. ..User level experiences as opposed to sales crap and engineering specs.

 

43 minutes ago, H4UL4U said:

It's all local and on-site. Never experienced any delay or latency issues with playout.

 

I assume by IP based you mean someone on a computer or automation has to trigger the playout of packages, where with Bitcentral it sounds like there’s a step saved that when the TD presses the source it automatically starts rolling.

 

Of course almost every station deals with file based playout.  I’m curious as to when they decide to move footage from online, to offline or in the cloud. 

[Eat News 4745]

1 hour ago, rkolsen said:

 

 

 

I assume by IP based you mean someone on a computer or automation has to trigger the playout of packages, where with Bitcentral it sounds like there’s a step saved that when the TD presses the source it automatically starts rolling.

 

Of course almost every station deals with file based playout.  I’m curious as to when they decide to move footage from online, to offline or in the cloud. 

 

I'm just visualizing punching the "take" and there is a lag because all our video is being stored in a cloud somewhere in India. But it sounds like you have actual local control on an in house local network as opposed to all of it off-site and relying on the regular internet and not dedicated lines.

 

Thanks...I'm getting a better idea of it now.

[H4UL4U 127]

10 hours ago, Eat News said:

 

I'm just visualizing punching the "take" and there is a lag because all our video is being stored in a cloud somewhere in India. But it sounds like you have actual local control on an in house local network as opposed to all of it off-site and relying on the regular internet and not dedicated lines.

 

Thanks...I'm getting a better idea of it now.

Yep...everything is in-house.

[H4UL4U 127]

11 hours ago, rkolsen said:

 

 

 

I assume by IP based you mean someone on a computer or automation has to trigger the playout of packages, where with Bitcentral it sounds like there’s a step saved that when the TD presses the source it automatically starts rolling.

 

Of course almost every station deals with file based playout.  I’m curious as to when they decide to move footage from online, to offline or in the cloud. 

In layman's terms that's how it works.

10 hours ago, Eat News said:

 

I'm just visualizing punching the "take" and there is a lag because all our video is being stored in a cloud somewhere in India. But it sounds like you have actual local control on an in house local network as opposed to all of it off-site and relying on the regular internet and not dedicated lines.

 

Thanks...I'm getting a better idea of it now.

That happened with ParkerVision, which was the first control room automation system that only a handful of stations used. And the only reason for the lag was because the automation was so rudimentary it would cue up then take the video when the director hit take-play on the system, so on air the video would be frozen momentarily before playing...every time.

 

Edit: I just realized with you being in California you may be familiar with ParkerVision since KGTV and KERO would have had it. 

[Eat News 4745]

26 minutes ago, H4UL4U said:

 

Edit: I just realized with you being in California you may be familiar with ParkerVision since KGTV and KERO would have had it. 

 

You got it!

 

Who didn't love Parker Vision and it's associated daily meltdowns and nightmares?

 

I hear there are people STILL in therapy to this day because of the long term traumatic affects of Parker Vision.

 

[H4UL4U 127]

We launch Bitcentral for the noon on Friday. From the tech side everything's gone great. I had my worries Ignite wouldn't play nice with it since everything with Bitcentral is RS-422 connected and Ignite prefers IP based connectivity, but so far, so good. To supplement Create's rather limited editing abilities the station sprung for Premiere building-wide. Even the Bitcentral trainers attested to the fact that Core is really meant for simple VOs, teases, national PKGs, and for logging, and for everything else to use Premiere.