Sony has announced new details on how the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) is using Sony’s Ci Media Cloud platform to streamline its workflows and accelerate its production processes.
Sony and NHRA said NHRA content teams routinely ingest hours of weekly racing footage, securely share and remotely edit files with teams nationwide, then deliver final assets to multiple platforms, partners and networks – all within tight deadlines, the companies explained.
To manage the high volume of content, NHRA chose Ci for its on-premises and cloud-based workflows.
“We want everyone to have the right tools to do their jobs efficiently and deliver our content as quickly as possible,” said Rob Hedrick, technical operations manager and senior director of production for the National Hot Rod Association. “Sony Ci is the unifying space where everyone can store, modify and share resources, securely and quickly. »
The NHRA team handles all production and distribution of its regular weekly television programming, including 20 national events as part of the “Mission Foods Drag Racing Series” broadcast on Fox Sports, as well as an average of eight broadcasts on the FOX broadcast network. such as shoulder programming, divisional and regional events. The team serves its NHRA TV OTT subscribers, multiple content delivery platforms and social media channels.
Their workload also includes managing content for on-site experiences, post-production shows like “NHRA in 30” and the “Lucas Oil Sportsmen series” and “Pro Mod”, as well as marketing, promotional content and continuous archival and a robust FAST Channel where fans can watch content since the sport’s inception in 1951, NHRA explained.
The team runs at least three simultaneous productions during each racing event. This translates to approximately four terabytes of content for each event, with between eight and 12 hours of video coming from 50 cameras connected via fiber, wireless or directly to the cloud, and the cameras filming content exclusively for social media.
Each year, the amount of content created by NHRA production teams varies between 600 and 900 hours – and every piece of that content is routed through Ci.
“We’re dealing with several days and hours of event footage,” said Megan Sewell, director of post-production for the NHRA. “It allows us to break everything down and organize everything by different races, events or landscapes. [a track or surrounding area]. We have to produce multiple scaled-down versions within 24 hours of an event, and we are able to put them together almost immediately. This is work we couldn’t do without Sony Ci.”
Sewell recalled several examples of Ci saving the production team valuable time at high-profile moments. For example, after each year’s final event, NHRA champions are announced and then recognized at an awards ceremony the following day, with each champion celebrated with a one- to two-minute video presentation.
“With Ci, we can immediately download the files from Sunday, flip them over to create these videos overnight and have them ready for Monday,” she said.
With audiences across all platforms now accustomed to on-demand content, the Ci platform’s MediaLog app also saved the NHRA social media team at least 90 minutes of work after each event, they said. explained the companies.
“Speed is of the essence as we constantly deliver content and updates to our fans,” said Nykki Schele, senior social media manager at NHRA. “Before, I had to go to the TV truck with a hard drive to retrieve clips at the end of the evening. Now, whether I’m in the media room, in the pits or at the top of the circuit, I can access content and distribute it immediately to our social channels.
Additionally, Ci makes it easy and quick to break longer items into shorter, user-friendly files, and also helps remote teams and different departments share files seamlessly, the companies reported.
“We often create social pieces that TV or on-location crews would like to use,” Schele said. “We can pull everything into Ci, push it to multiple departments at once, and everyone has access to the same videos, which is very helpful. »
NHRA also reported that using a cloud-based platform such as Ci eliminates the need for NHRA to maintain large on-site storage pools in its offices, especially when most people work at remotely or in several offices. The editors, directors, announcers, and producers are all located in different cities, but everyone can see everything, put together a show, check the timing, give approval, and then send it to its final destination.
With such a distributed team, the flexibility in how NHRA can configure separate spaces for different teams in Ci is a significant advantage. The ability to create and assign different workspaces for various workflows and the ability to quickly share access to footage with remote team members improves productivity.
“I can easily contact my producer in California or a track in St. Louis to request a video,” Sewell said. “Ci’s cloud-based transfer and storage significantly improves our communication. »
NHRA began using Ci in 2017 and has since continually expanded its use of the platform’s capabilities: uploading, storing, feeding live streams, recording key moment timecodes and broadcasting; automate its ingestion and download processes; store a library of 75 years of archive images, shared between departments; and taking full advantage of the field-to-cloud workflow.
“We quickly realized how important and effective it is to have a digital asset solution that can be used quickly and efficiently,” said Stephen Reintjes, vice president of broadcasting for NHRA. “We spent the first few years exploring its characteristics and potential, and now there’s no going back. It’s an ongoing process and to even suggest we’ve scratched the surface of what Ci can do is an understatement.
Sony and the NHRA technical teams also reported that when NHRA began using Ci, the potential savings in storage, time and costs were immediately evident. They evaluated other on-premises storage options that wouldn’t have been able to hold half the content currently stored in Ci – and would have cost millions more in the long run.
Reintjes noted that Ci’s automated storage management policies allow NHRA to create policies that push content into archival storage and then further into S3 Glacier-based archival storage based on a predetermined number of days, months or years.
The NHRA’s annual racing calendar generally features the same events taking place at the same times of the year. The association established a rule that at 400 days, races are placed in archival storage, and then at 800 days, in deep archival storage, allowing NHRA to effectively manage its storage costs without having to keep so much content in active storage, the companies said.
“In every way, Ci is really the heart of our entire workflow,” Hedrick said. “Automating our entire workflow as part of our entire process helps us work more efficiently, deliver content quickly, and become better storytellers.” »