I have a confession here: I am not a big watcher of reality TV. I think I have watched maybe two hours of reality TV — that is a lifetime total. But on a visit to Bunim-Murray Productions in the center of San Fernando Valley last week, I came away impressed, and I didn’t even get to see Paris and Nicole filming their latest show.
Setting up one of the first and one of the largest all-digital video production networks looks a lot easier now that the company has been producing a series of hit reality TV shows for the past year on the system. But handling terabytes of storage and moving all that video over Ethernet didn’t come easily.
While it would have been fun to see Paris on the streets of LA, what I was really interested in was Bunim-Murray’s storage area network. They have more than 30 terabytes of video files on their system, which is composed of twin Apple X-SAN servers and loads of hard disks spinning away.
“We have big files, big bandwidth, and big deadlines, with over 300 users on our network,” says JB Blunck, a SVP with the firm.
Bunim-Murray may not be a household name, but the production does handles several hit shows, including The Simple Life, The Real World, Starting Over, and The Gauntlet. They have pioneered reality production, and continue to find ways to improve and use digital technologies in their daily jobs. When I was visited, I saw them preparing a robotic TV studio that they have on premises to videotape interviews, Webcasts, and other bits.
The word videotape is somewhat misleading, because of course everything that they do goes directly to digital video. What was impressive about this studio wasn’t the green screen or the massive array of lights, but the fact that the entire operation ran on a couple of stock G5 Macs and ordinary digital video camcorders — albeit higher-end ones than most of us would have in our homes, but not all that different.
“One person can control the entire studio,” says JB. “What we have done is put the technology in the hands of the people that have to make the production decisions, making us much more productive.”
Some of their shows generate a great deal of video each day — after all, there are several cameras rolling for many hours capturing all the reality zeitgeist and inter-personal conflicts out in the field on the set of the shows. “We do 3500 hours of video per season for The Real World alone,” says JB. “Every show generates a huge amount of storage. While film is a director’s medium, reality TV is the editor’s medium as the story must be pieced together from all the raw video.”
Unlike other reality shows that “enhance reality” by manipulating the
production to create drama, Bunim-Murray prefers the classic cinema
verite approach. “We draw a strict line between the cast and crew,”
says Mark Raudonis, the VP of post production. “What you see on screen
really happened, with no interference or suggestion from us.”
The reality of their network is its reliability. “We have a drive failure every couple of months, but it isn’t any big deal because of our SAN RAID. From an operational standpoint, I don’t get a lot of calls in the middle of the night and we haven’t had any system meltdowns,” said JB.
“We are able to leverage advances in technology to do things that weren’t possible a couple of years ago,” says Raudonis. “We use a couple of stock Macs, some $500 pieces of software and some nice monitors that replace $20,000 worth of Sony gear,” says Raudonis. “There isn’t anything proprietary about what we are doing, and we are just using off-the-shelf stuff.”
The company started doing digital recordings in the field a few years ago and gradually replaced their Avid editing gear with Apple’s Final Cut Pro. “We made a conscious decision two years ago to change our digital destiny,” says Raudonis. Now all their editing is done on the Macs and the only videotape to be found in the place are archival copies of the older shows.
Having all this digital content online has changed the way the company edits and produces the shows. “We have all 165 shows of Starting Over available online for the editors to tap into,” says Raudonis. “The editor has every frame of every scene for the entire season at his fingertips. We can find a shot for any show at any time and use it easily. We are sitting in a stealth bomber here,” he says. Other production companies have to first locate a specific tape and shot on it, which consumes a lot of time and may not be worth the search. At Bunim-Murray, it takes seconds.
Part of their network extends over the Internet, and allows producers and staffers working on the shows to review the dailies by logging into a secure Web site and see the actual raw footage. “We use to Fedex firewire drives to our producers around the country. Now we use FTP and high-speed connections,” says JB. They cut the 30 hours of daily videos for The Real World, for example, down to a 30-minute highlight reel that begins the production process.
When asked what is left to conquer technologically, Raudonis says “infinite bandwidth and unlimited storage. Moore’s law has been accurate in predicting our storage news and enabled to do an incredible amount of work. Broadband still isn’t enough for us to ship a lot of media over the ‘Net, and FedExing a big box of tapes still beats the Internet.” Interestingly, CPU isn’t a problem for their system — at least for the time being until high definition video kicks in. And with 30-some terabytes of video data and narry a dropped frame, it is an impressive system indeed.
As JB says, “A terabyte isn’t what it used to be.” But what is amazing to see is how they have taken what used to be fairly standard IT desktop technology and put it together to drive their entire business. It is definitely a sign of things to come.
David Strom's Web Informant 
While this article is a great example of how digital technology can enable a smaller firm to manage terabytes of data, I think perhaps there are bigger messages here too.
About the only thing that’s new at Bunim-Murray is that they were able to piece the system together with all-Apple gear; that’s of course a powerful endorsement for the do-it-yourself crowd, but B-MP are in no way pioneers in this regard. 4MC, Liberty, of course the rest of the big-media companies–they’ve been using SANs to manage everything from film DIs (Digital Intermediates) down to nightly TV for nearly a decade. Nearly every show you’ve watched in the last four years, certainly almost every TV show, was digitized, edited and output from a system identical in method/production flow to what B-MP showed you.
About the only truly revolutionary part of the equation is if B-MP went (1) completely tapeless and (2) didn’t use Sony XDCAM products. It’s especially revolutionary if they (3) rolled their own digital capture system, e.g. with Aja cards directly from the back of the cameras.
The remaining tyranny of the broadcast quadropoly (Sony, Panasonic, JVC, Canon; to a lesser extent Philips & Ikegami) is the storage medium on the back of the camera; whether King Tape or their own proprietary tapeless storage (Sony: XDCAM disc; Panasonic: P2 PCMCIA storage), they have kept pro camera/equipment prices from falling as quickly by requiring, if you will, their own dongle. Once ingested into your own digital asset management system, you’re (almost) home free, but that’s been the remaining hold they have on the production process, at least on the origination end.
Not to sell B-MP short; it was a big business decision for them to bet this system would meet their needs and save a pile of cash, particularly on employees. Moving to 100% tapeless production was a singularity for the industry, albeit one we’ve written about for over a decade.
True, B-MP wasn’t ever going to buy anything that said DataDirect on it (the leader in HD-ready SANs; also the darling of Sandia et al); instead, the Apple-Uber-Alles approach was ALWAYS going to be their mantra. Not necessarily bad, but certainly it shows a particular bias all too common in Hollywood. And Apple XSANs aren’t even close to being the most cost-effective SAN, not at the 30+ TByte mark, not on paper anyway. Certainly the all-Apple straitjacket makes it more difficult to, e.g., attach non-Apple equipment to an Apple SAN, unless their storage virtualization software has matured greatly since I last saw it. (Memo to self: check this out at NAB, the National Association of Broadcasters show, April 23-26, Las Vegas.)
Another big story: The affordability of this technology is highly disruptive; a recent study (I believe it was Deloitte) showed headcounts at the surveyed effects/post houses to be well down from previous years. Professional effects artists, editors, segment producers, etc., are at risk for the constant churn and job-loss that has been the IT industry’s mantra for a decade. So, too, the heavenly host of late lamented effects/production companies rotting in a shallow grave somewhere between Burbank and Santa Monica; it’s a tough business to compete in.
I’m not suggesting we mourn the lost buggy-whip manufacturers, but if a single person can run an automated studio, there are 5-10 people who lost their jobs that day. The human and business stories are important here.
My two cent’s worth.
Alex Pournelle
Contributing Editor, Byte Media Lab
Alexp@earthlink.net