Harmonic Provides Media Asset Management Platform for Home Depot Television

The Home Depot has deployed the Harmonic Media Application Server (MAS) asset management platform and ProXplore media and workflow management application with a XenData archive to establish highly efficient media handling and storage for Home Depot Television (HDTV).

The pairing extends the efficiency of HDTV’s existing Omneon MediaGrid shared storage platform by enabling visibility and coordinated management of content from ingest through archive. The resulting speed at which HDTV staff now can manage, access, and process stored content has allowed the Atlanta facility to increase its yearly production capacity greatly.

“The MAS platform and MediaGrid storage allowed us to get our operation flowing efficiently from start to finish,” said Bruce Covey, manager of business TV engineering at Home Depot Television. “Now that our MediaGrid production storage system is seamlessly integrated with our tape library via ProXplore, we can take full advantage of our shift to file-based operations while achieving an economical balance of spinning-disk and tape-based storage. I couldn’t imagine going back to how we were doing things before.”

The HDTV facility operates a satellite headend that delivers live and on-demand communications and employee training videos, averaging 30 minutes in length, to 2,244 Home Depot stores. With HDTV’s existing Harmonic media processing and storage platform, installed in 2010, editors already had the tools to start new Final Cut Pro projects, track assets, and see proxy views of ingested content.

Now, using the ProXplore application, HDTV staff can also move projects from online storage on a 24TB MediaGrid storage system to offline storage on a Qualstar tape robot. A dedicated folder within each project folder automates the process of proxy creation and archiving; the editor drops appropriate files into the folder, and the content is processed and stored according to preset parameters.

The MAS database of project folders maintains the relationships of different files and projects, even after the assets move offline. Proxies of all edited and finished content remain available to editors, who can search for content, scrub through to find the clips they need, and flag material for restoration to online storage. If users recall an entire project folder, the MAS software compiles those assets and restores the full project folder to a specific location on the MediaGrid system.

HDTV maintains about six months of content on the MediaGrid system and earlier content on 80 tapes within the mirrored XenData archive system. An external XenData drive allows staff to access content on tapes that have been taken out of the robotic library. Later this year, the facility will expand the capacity of its MediaGrid system with an upgrade to 2TB drives.

“The end-to-end solution in place at HDTV streamlines the facility’s handling of numerous incoming formats and simplifies the management of this large volume of content, wherever that content is stored,” said Simon Eldridge, senior product manager at Harmonic. “The dramatic gain in efficiency and productivity that HDTV has realized with ProXplore and MediaGrid demonstrates the significant value that Harmonic media processing and storage solutions bring to production operations.”