Inside Microsoft studios

All-in-one solutions typically exist only in overblown marketing material. But Microsoft Studios truly fits the bill. "It's basically a television studio, a post-production facility, and a new media development house," says Steve Carlisle, director of media services at Microsoft Studios.The Microsoft Studios facility houses four sound stages - from a 60-by-40-foot stage to a 22-by-22-foot insert stage. The stages are equipped with nine patchable studio cameras (from Hitachi and Sony), and are run from two identical video control rooms (with Grass Valley switchers). Post-production facilities include two Axial online edit suites, four Avid and Discreet off-line editing systems, and a Discreet Inferno visual effects suite.The standard recording format used by the Studios is Digital Betacam, although the capability exists to play back material sourced on mini-DV, DVCPro, and other video formats. Media files are stored on and sourced from Pluto Technologies' digital disk recorders. Audio sweetening takes place in a dedicated room on an SSL console. And product demonstrations originating on PCs are scan-converted in a separate suite. Microsoft Studios also sends out four ENG-style camera fly-packs to record up to 40 shows or segments per month, on location.Unlike its broadcast television cousins, the Microsoft Studios facility offers extensive encoding capabilities. Carlisle notes, "Everything we do has to be compressed. Almost nothing that we create here gets distributed in an analog or videotape format. It's all going to go onto the network or a CD or a DVD. Consequently, the compression services here are pretty robust ... from DVD authoring, different MPEG formats, AVIs, you name it."Encoded media files are streamed from three dual-700MHz machines. With 40 terabytes of storage capacity, the Microsoft Media Archives are prepared to handle a lot of streaming media. Six terabytes are already being used to store more than 1 million digital media files - and the Archives are growing at a rate of 15,000 to 20,000 new files per month. Archives are using the Virage VideoLogger to catalog 25,000 hours of currently un-indexed video content.

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