Alex Informatics, the Lachine, Que.-based company that was named Canadian Information Technology Innovator of the year this spring, has made its latest gambit in the broadcast and post industries, the Aurora Workgroup Editing Solution.

The Aurora was unveiled at the International Broadcast Conference in Amsterdam last month as a ‘virtual server,’ a software-based, shared-storage solution for the nt platform. Aurora provides shared realtime Motion jpeg or uncompressed video to up to 100 nt nonlinear editing workstations, accommodating the increasingly collaborative post process.

The Aurora system connects workstations to a centralized storage array using Fiber Channel or Serial Storage Architecture and the Aurora software is installed on each workstation.

Aurora product manager Gerry Sullivan says ssa and Fiber Channel are the most efficient connection and storage technologies for the system.

‘If you look at the different storage technologies, the mainstream mechanism for connecting computers to discs has been scsi,’ says Sullivan. ‘It’s designed for short distances and has limited support for multiple devices. The new technologies, ssa and Fiber Channel, are hybrids of the scsi channel approach and a network approach.’

The product is being aimed at broadcasters and post facilities and is based on Alex’s Libra Media Server. Libra is a cost-effective, software-based multimedia delivery and archiving system which allows access to digitized content by thousands of users. Libra has made progress in European and Asian markets, with the largest system recently installed in the National Library of France. Libra is also being used by European broadcasters and the system is used for media monitoring, providing concise statistics on spot and program viewership.

The impetus for the development of Aurora was the persistent high bandwidth demands of the video world.

‘We were doing work with Libra in video,’ says Sullivan. ‘People would seek us out to handle high bandwidth video problems and that’s where we started to run into the limitations of Libra technology. On the creative side, people are talking about uncompressed or mjpeg and with the kind of bit rates associated with that master copy or in the process of working, it generally tends to be more difficult to support that in a network environment. That’s been the motive behind looking at a storage area network solution based on ssa and Fiber Channel.’

Sullivan says the system is aimed at any facility where video editing tools are used, and he expects that within 12 to 18 months most broadcasters will be looking at having some form of video networking solution in place.

On the post facility side, Sullivan says the Aurora system provides significant work flow advantages, allowing a post team independent and concurrent access to a common digital video file library.

Looking at some of the new suites of products being introduced, like Digital Studio from Softimage, Sullivan notes that for such rich sets of tools, the likelihood of running them on a single workstation is low.

‘You’re typically going to spread out the tools over multiple workstations,’ says Sullivan. ‘In that type of environment where you can see up front you’re going to have multiple people involved, the ability to have a common storage pool attached to all those workstations offers tremendous work flow benefits.’

Such benefits include the elimination of tape copies, file transfers and ‘sneakernet’ (‘If I have unconnected workstations and I need to share files I have to put on my sneakers, grab a disc and run it over to the next stationÉ’).

Feedback from ibc has been positive, says Sullivan, adding an outstanding element of the show was the migration to nt evident there, which he says will grow the market for Aurora.

Aurora will be shipping at the end of October and the first system has been installed in the u.s. The system is priced at us$3,500 per seat.