Outside, it was banana-republic time. Gardai lined approach roads to make sure nobody upset stars whizzing to the MTV event by staring too hard at them. Roads had been closed and traffic snarled up for the benefit of the show. Official Ireland was vigorously tugging at its forelock.
Inside The Yard, a video facilities house on Sheriff Street, things were different. There was at least something to see. Stacked on foam-padded pallets in a second-floor room - and not caring who stared at them - were some of the real visiting stars of the MTV awards.
The six squat units each held 10 hard disks of 18 gigabytes capacity. Give or take a few libraries'-worth of information it added up to a terabyte of data storage. That's a million megabytes, a thousand gigabytes, a lot of storage. If the population of Dublin and its hinterland is put at a million people, then this thing could hold a megabyte of data (200,000 words, or four novels' worth of text) for every single one of them.
The Avid storage system had been flown in to augment the digital editing facilities at The Yard and allow staff based there to produce almost-instant TV programmes from the event. The first, on ITV, was to be broadcast 30 minutes after the awards ceremony finished.
"Do NOT close" ordered a sign written in marker over the open window that brought a fibre-optic link from the Point Depot a few hundred yards away. The four channels of video carried on the link were to be digitised live and streamed on to the storage array. Then, as the awards event proceeded, editors would begin assembling programmes from the action on stage and the two cameras roving the backstage area. Audio processing, special effects, titling and the rest of the business were to be done at top speed and with virtually no margin of error.
It was three hours to show-time and tension crackled in the air of the editing suite. Another large sign on the door said all mobile phones had to be turned off on entry. Outside, a generator-truck droned. The editing suite had been put on generator power as a precaution against failure or fluctuation in the mains supply. Nothing could go wrong, could it?
THE MTV event highlighted the way computer technology has transformed TV and video production. Editing a programme out of the MTV awards in realtime required the latest in digital editing technology. A few years ago it would have been near impossible.
The central idea is simple enough. Once a stream of video is digitised and stored on a computer instead of on tape it becomes much easier to chop, change, edit and adjust it. Digital editing does for video what the word processor did for writing. In less-pressurised circumstances than the MTV event, for example, it means an editor can easily assemble multiple versions of the same sequence, then compare them and choose the best. Word processors arrived a long time ago. Digital video editing took a while longer because of the voracious storage demands of video information, even when compressed. The need for high-capacity storage and very fast performance by networks and workstations means leading-edge technology is seized on and pressed into service.
Avid (www.avid.com) doesn't have the market for this equipment to itself, but it has a very large slice of it. In a press release last month it claimed that 96 per cent of this autumn's hit TV shows in the US had been edited on one of its systems. The market for digital editing systems has exploded over the past decade, bringing Avid's revenues from $1 million in 1989 to over $482 million last year.
At The Yard, it was an Avid show. Four of its Media Composer workstations were used to digitise the video feeds from the Point Depot and store the resulting files on the MediaNet shared storage system mentioned above. Two more MediaComposers were used for the editing work and another was used to "play" one finished programme live to air. This one had been shot, edited, finished and broadcast without ever touching tape - a video version of the paperless office.
Specialist video production houses like The Yard use highspec and correspondingly highprice equipment. The week of the MTV event, however, IBM announced a move that could significantly cut the cost of digital editing. For less than £8,000 it plans to offer an IBM workstation, with Avid Xpress DV editing software and webhosting of video on its global network. Announcing the move, Steve Kleynams of IBM said it aimed to do for video what desktop publishing did for print in the 1980s - bring it in-house and put it directly under a company's own control. As for the MTV show, yes it was alright on the night, as far as the editing work went - whatever about the content. Then the storage stars were put back into their crate-limousines and flown off to their next big gig.
fomarcaigh@irish-times.ie