Intaj lights up

Hasan Sayed Hasan, head of intaj says the facility's USP is its human resources.
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Last month, twofour54, Abu Dhabi’s media precinct, launched a state-of-the-art facility called intaj, to provide production houses and broadcasters with a one-stop HD solution that will enable them to undertake their entire workflow from content generation and editing to delivery.

In more ways than one, intaj is thought to be unique. While it may not be the largest facility in the region, it’s the only one that presently offers a media asset management facility service for the region besides providing industry-standard solutions for end users.

Intaj presently operates five studios and several post production suites from two sites in Abu Dhabi located at the National Theatre site and Khalifa Park. The former includes three large HD studios, post production suites, and MAM and archiving systems while the latter, which is located within twofour54’s headquarters, comprises, in addition to two small HD studios and post production suites, a playout centre and satellite teleport as well.

Heading the facility is Hasan Sayed Hasan, a former winner of the Digital Studio Broadcast Engineer of the Year award.

Hasan says clients can access an end-to-end solution that spans across all departments or use a combination of services that their project requires.

“The system is built in a flexible way to allow various clients — each one of them having a different requirement or wanting to work in a different workflow — to do their work smoothly,” he explains.
Hasan leads the tour.

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Our first stop is at twofour54 intaj’s three large studios that were being used at the time of going to press by Abu Dhabi TV’s sports channel — a clear indication that demand will rise in time. Intaj boasts five studios in all.

Ranging in size from a news studio of 60sqm to a large live audience entertainment production studio of 650sqm, each studio is sound proofed and equipped with fully saturated lighting rigs and soft infinity cycloramas.

“Each of our studios comes with a fully-equipped production gallery, corresponding green rooms, VIP rooms, and make-up and dressing rooms. Each client’s individual lighting and studio configurations can be saved so they don’t have to revisit their settings each time they come to the facility,” explains Hasan.

“In addition, we have a dedicated production gallery for each studio. This ensures that the facility can record or air five live broadcast shows at the same time,” he adds.

Large “elephant doors” allow full drive-in access to the three larger studios at the National Theatre site.

The studios include dedicated storage facilities to store clients’ sets and other paraphernalia.

STUDIO RECORDING

Next, we move on to the studio recording area. The Pharos Mediator plays a key role here. It is used to initiate studio recordings, and control routers and servers for recording live and studio feeds.

Hasan explains how it works.

“To start the recording process, the material ID is entered together with other available metadata such as a nominal duration. The server can be cued and placed into record, which will continue until the specified duration is reached or the Stop button is pressed. The recording is automatically entered in the Mediator database and is available for further processing such as transcoding for browse,” he says.

Multiple record ports can also be triggered from a single panel to provide ‘ganged’ record functions. In the meantime, ingest can be triggered via a soft panel, mouse click or a physical panel.