Creative Mobile Solutions Helps Ensure Flawless Delivery of 2019 GRAMMY Digital Content   

The Grammy Awards are a big deal: it’s an entertainment extravaganza full of big acts, big audiences, and yes, big technical complexities.  Millions of people tuned in live to view one of the most-watched programs of the year.  Many more will get their GRAMMY fix from one or more online outlets, streaming live or near-live content to their mobile devices and laptops wherever they happen to be.  As an audience member, it’s a whole lot of fun to watch—but making sure that all aspects of the event are recorded, edited, and published without technical difficulties, well, let’s say it’s a bit of a challenge.

“With a live show of this magnitude with a global audience, VOD content delivery has to be nearly instantaneous. Creative Mobile Solutions Inc (CMSI) provided the technical expertise and a failsafe data solution for Music’s Biggest Night,” said Paul Madeira, managing director/executive producer, The Recording Academy.

Not many technology vendors are able to step up to this daunting task.  Creative Mobile Solutions (CMSI), a post-production leader with deep expertise in tapeless workflows for live events and studio-based shows,  made sure that the post-production and content-delivery workflows scaled to the magnitude of content data from this year’s show.

Tackling the 2019 Grammys with a better workflow

CMSI deployed automated tools on location at the GRAMMYs to streamline the recording and creating video clips on EVS servers and writing them to high performance OpenDrives storage.  The clips were then processed for online distribution.  On site production and processing was more nimble and QC and distribution was able to be handled offsite.

What CMSI implemented at the GRAMMYs was a workflow that is at once more efficient and also guarantees higher performance, throughput, and data integrity.  CMSI is essentially in two places at once, providing EVS workflow design and infrastructure, recording the footage and starting the process of creating VOD clips.  All recordings and VODs are stored to an onsite OpenDrives Apex system, which is their all-flash ultra-high performance solution.   Also connected to this Apex system are high-performance video encoders.

An automated workflow took the 2019 GRAMMY video segments and processed them to necessary delivery specifications based on where they were to be viewed.  Once assembled, the workflow sent these files from location at the Staples Center over a dedicated data line to various teams offsite for posting.

At this point, editors were engaged, performed QC and final pass edits, carried out any fixes, and then delivered the content through various channels and endpoints, such as the GRAMMY.com website and official Social Media profiles.  Making it the perfect mix of technology, automation, and human creative editing.

The goal is to reduce complexity

CMSI put its energy and technical know-how into the task of reducing the overall complexity of the content data infrastructure and workflow, understanding what it takes to produce 20 streams of content going to a single storage solution because they understood the workflow from all angles.  With its expertise, CMSI had the right technology and workflow to meet the unique requirements of the 2019 GRAMMYs.

 

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