Sony CSM100B User manual

“A Beka Academy” Keeps Video Library
Organized with the Sony HDXchange System.
CASE STUDY
Customer:
• Pensacola Christian College’s
“A Beka Academy”
Industry:
• Education
Challenges:
• Create an ongoing archive
of recorded classroom lessons
to easily share with students,
faculty and other schools
• Efciently manage and
distribute video content for
simultaneous review and
editing by multiple parties
Solution:
• Implement a solution comprising
Sony’s Media Backbone™
HDXchange™ networked
content management system,
PetaSite™ content manage-
ment library system and
XDCAM® HD optical disc system
Benefits:
• The school’s production and
editing workflows are now
based on a scalable and easy-
to-manage le-based system
• Recorded instructional content
is easily shared, reviewed, edited
and distributed to customers in
a more timely fashion
• Turnaround time for producing
nished content is reduced from
months to just days
• The school’s library of recorded
content is archived in a more
secure and accessible system
Recording hours of video during each
school day for several decades can
result in a massive library of mixed legacy
footage. At Pensacola Christian College’s
“A Beka Academy,” the goal of capturing
all this footage is to have an ongoing
archive of classroom lessons to easily
share with its kindergarten through 12th
grade home school students and with
other schools. But for Greg Moses, the
school’s TV and DVD productions director,
efciently managing and distributing all
this video is a challenge.
The Academy’s mission is to give young
people a quality traditional education
from a Christian perspective. The school
has been in existence for 50 years, and
started recording lessons in the early 80’s.
“All the instructional material presented
live in the classrooms every day is
recorded,” Moses said. “We produce DVD,
Web and streaming content for students
at other Christian schools or home-school
students to use, so they can watch and
study right along with our students, using
the same curriculum and materials.”
The Academy distributes content to more
than 43,000 home-school customers, as
well as several hundred schools.
“Our recording started on U-matic, moved
to DVCAM™ and now we use the XDCAM
optical disc system,” he said. “We needed
to move our production and editing into
a more scalable and easy-to-manage
le-based system.”
The technology that the Academy chose
was Sony’s Media Backbone HDXchange
networked content management system,
working together with Sony’s PetaSite
content management library system.
“It’s allowed us to maintain our daily
library of instructional content in a way
that we can easily access it and get it to
our customers in a more timely fashion,”
Moses said. “We converted everything
to AVI les that are stored in the PetaSite
system, and all those les are available
through the HDXchange system. We’re
always recording, revising or correcting
something, so the HDXchange system is a
perfect match for how we need to work.”
One of the system’s main benets is that it
provides simultaneous access to content
by multiple parties. Also, the academy’s
faculty and production teams are
impressed with the HDXchange system’s
auto-ingest functionality, improving the
ingest process, placing material where it
needs to go and making it available to
everyone who needs to use it.
The system also allows operators to add
clip- and timecode-based metadata,
even as material is coming into the
system, which allows them to more easily
identify and jump to key points in the
video.
“If we need to nd a piece of legacy
footage, I can go into the archive on the
PetaSite system, search for it and do what
we need to it through the HDXchange
system,” Moses said.
“We just love it,” he added. “It gives us
fast and easy access to all our work.”
The system has reduced the Academy’s
turnaround time for producing nished
content from months to just days.
“In the past, teachers would have to go
back to the classroom to review a tape,”
Moses said. “Now, they can watch it from
their ofce or anywhere on campus that
they can log into the system,” he said. “It
gives them a lot more exibility and they
can review a lesson more quickly.”

CASE STUDY
Sony Electronics Inc.
1 Sony Drive
Park Ridge, NJ 07656
sony.com/hdxchange
V-2525
© 2011 Sony Electronics Inc.All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission
is prohibited.Features and specifications are subject to change without notice.Sony, XDCAM,HDXchange,
DVCAM, Media Backbone, and the Sony make.believe logo are trademarks of Sony.
Printed in USA 12/11
It’s allowed us to
maintain our daily
library of instructional
content in a way
that we can easily
access it and get
it to our customers
in a more timely
fashion . . .We’re
always recording,
revising or correcting
something, so the
HDXchange system
is a perfect match
for how we need to
work.
“
”
Teachers and administrators now have
access to the footage simultaneously. “They
review the dailies for self-improvement and for
accuracy of content,” he said. “Having several
people review at the same time helps us put
out a quality product in a shorter timeframe.
In a typical week, Monday’s video is ingested
into the system on Monday afternoon, so by
Tuesday morning the editors are working on
Monday’s video. It’s edited, checked, and
ready for distribution within a week’s time.
“Usually we’re running only about two days
behind what’s being taught in the classroom,”
he said.
That’s a dramatic difference from the
Academy’s tape-based days.
“In the past, a lesson would get put on tape,
edited, and would have to be duplicated,”
Moses said. “We used VHS for years, and
then DVDs, but they would have to go to
a replicator who took our masters and
encoded the content into the DVD format.
Then they would send us back an approval
DVD, which we’d check against the master to
make sure it was correct before they would
make 1,000 to 1,500 copies that would be
shipped to customers.
“It was months before a customer would ever
get our product,” he said. “Now, we have it
ready for streaming in just a few days.”
The combination of the PetaSite and
HDXchange systems helps in the event of lost
or damaged footage.
“In a typical day, whatever’s ingested in an
afternoon is edited the next morning, and it
gets posted to the various places it needs
to go,” Moses said. “The PetaSite system is
scheduled every night at midnight for back-
ups, so it automatically backs up everything
and then we can move that content off the
HDXchange system to make room for the next
day’s content, and do it very quickly.”
Recently, a partner in the distribution chain for
the Academy’s streaming content updated
something in their system and lost several
original les. “With this technology, rather
than having to re-render the les, we just
restored them from the H.264 version that
are also archived on the PetaSite system and
re-posted them. That saved us a tremendous
amount of time.”
Looking ahead, Moses is condent that the
HDXchange and PetaSite technologies can
grow with the school as its video production
needs increase.
“We expanded the HDXchange system with
an additional 48 TB of Network Attached
Storage, and we can do that again easily if
necessary,” he said. “It’s very exible, you can
scale it to meet your needs and nd creative
solutions that will help you store and keep
your data and have it available when you
need it.”
– Greg Moses, TV and
DVD productions
director, Pensacola
Christian College’s
“A Beka Academy”