MODULAR SOFTWARE BASED VIDEO PRODUCTION SERVER, METHOD FOR OPERATING THE VIDEO PRODUCTION SERVER AND DISTRIBUTED VIDEO PRODUCTION SYSTEM

摘要

A distributed video production system comprising at least a video production server having at least one processor and a storage. Software modules composed of executable program code are loaded into a working memory of the at least one processor. Each software module, when executed by the at least one processor, provides an elementary service. A concatenation of elementary services provides processing of video and/or audio signals for producing a broadcast program. Each functionality ( ingest, storing, encoding, editing, decoding, playing ) of the video production server is achieved by using a specific piece of software that is assembled from reusable functional software blocks and that can run on any compatible hardware platform. The internal processing is based on Application Programming Interfaces API using standard formats and a pipeline. Furthermore, a method for operating the video production server and a distributed video production system including the video production server is defined. The scalable software storage component provides instantaneous fine grained IP-based access to grains (a grain is a single image or frame). Synchronicity is obtained by assignment of time-stamps to the grains by the ingest module. All inter-equipment communication of commands and signals is achieved through IP links. The hardware modules are synchronised over an IP network, for instance by a PTP IEEE1588 protocol. The system provides thus for asynchronous internal processing and synchronicity of input and output frames at the boundaries of the system. The advantages are : On-the-fly reconfiguration (remapping of software to hardware from one grain to the next ), on-the-fly dynamic modification of the sequence of elementary services, statistical hardware dimensioning, platform independent implementation.