Dixon Sports Streamlines MSG Media’s Content Management

Just in time for the start of 2010-11 NBA and NHL seasons, MSG Media revamped its content-management system with a variety of tapeless storage solutions from Dixon Sports. MSG Media technology partner Harris Broadcast tapped Dixon Sports to provide logging, tagging, and archiving equipment and software for the new digital setup.

“It’s easy to use, and the big picture is that you can search on anything now,” says Dixon Sports VP Brad Willie. “You’re not rumbling through trying to find a tape that somebody has sitting on their desk. It’s entirely tapeless and makes life a lot easier.”

Seven Teams To Log
MSG Media is home to seven professional sports teams — Knicks, Rangers, Liberty, Islanders, Devils, Sabres, and Red Bulls — which means that editors must log and tag video clips from multiple games nearly every night. To do so, MSG Media deploys six logging stations, each equipped with Dixon Sports’ logging system.

“On an average night this time of year, there are multiple games going on, so the loggers come in, and one may be assigned to do the Ranger game, one a Knick game, one a Sabers game, and so on,” says Willie. “They watch the game they’re assigned to and mark each play, tag it, and log it in the system.”

A Hilite for MSG Media
MSG Media’s HD facility runs on a Harris NEXIO SAN system linking four hardware-based hi-res Harris Velocity edit stations, six software-based low-res Velocity ESX stations, and four Apple Final Cut Studio edit stations on a single shared-storage network. The four hardware-based Velocity workstations are used to assemble the primary highlight reels.

After each clip is logged, Dixon’s Hilite Selector software allows MSG Media’s team of editors to immediately drag-and-drop the play from the on-screen database directly to the timeline on his or her edit station.

“As soon as the logger marks a play, it’s available to the editor,” says Willie. “They’re trying to create these packages on the fly so that, when they go to their halftime or intermission show, they have a package of highlights from that period.”

From Active to Archive and Back
All content is tagged with editorial notes, IDs, and a variety of metadata before being transported over to MSG’s media-asset-management (MAM) system. As part of the off-season installation, MSG brought in four Dixon Sports MAM stations integrated with Marquis Broadcast’s Medway software. This system allows editors and producers to move content seamlessly between MSG’s Isilon server archive and the online NEXIO SAN system that connects each workstation.

“About a week after a game, they’re going to delete all the hi-res content off the NEXIO SAN, just because it takes up too much room,” says Willie. “Let’s say, a month from now, when the Ducks come back to town, they need to go back and find some of those clips to make a promo. So they go in their archive system, and they do a search for highlighted plays from Rangers-Ducks game. With the click of a button, they can move them back from the archive into the local SAN so that the editor can pick those clips up and make a package.”