Read the Press Release

Read all about Sienna's TriCaster support here

Read NewTek's blog on our collaboration here

Read Sienna Partner TamedTechnology's blog here

Read the Press Release

Read all about Sienna's Anywhere support here
Watch a video introducing Anywhere here

Read the Broadcast Engineering Magazine Coverage here

Adobe Premiere Support
SEAMLESS EDIT INTEGRATION
Sienna's unmatched workflow with Apple Final Cut Pro 7 has now been complemented with fully integrated support for Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 (Mac) as a central edit platform for Sienna systems. The Premiere Pro workflow follows a similar model to the existing FCP model, including direct connection from the Sienna Web MAM into Premiere, and a 'Deliver To Sienna' export menu item. Sienna sites can seamlessly mix FCP7 and Premiere Pro Sienna clients in the same infrastructure, and Sienna can even deliver assets created in FCP7 into Premiere as original source sequences. Sienna also manages the presets used by Premiere, allowing broadcasters to enforce a specific or different codec format for each Sienna delivery point. Full integration with Sienna Web logging and Sienna ImpulsEdit rounds off the great support for Premiere in the Sienna environment.

Mobile & Field Journalism
INTEGRATION FOR UGC & REMOTE UPLINK
Modern news workflows are changing, and field based workflows are becoming increasingly important. Sienna offers a raft of features for field journalism, including remote access to the Sienna MediaSearch system, and the ability to integrate Laptops, Tablets and Smart-phones into the workflow. Using Sienna, a field editor with a MacBook can use the same workflow remotely, that is used inside the station - the one-click 'Deliver To Sienna' menu works in exactly the same way for submitting a finished package, or even remotely filling a placeholder in a MOS rundown.

For limited bandwidth connections, Sienna's 'BROXY' workflow (BRoadcastable prOXY) allows automatic transmission of packages in H.264, with the ability to play these out to air using Sienna VirtualVTR, natively, and without any need for transcoding back into the station format.

In an alternative field workflow, Sienna FileFlow can act as an intelligent media receiver integrated with cloud storage, into which, field journalists can easily upload photos and videos with no special firewall or other networking complications. FileFlow can intelligently parse media and metadata to mark up, check-in and transcode if necessary, using custom scripts to match the required workflow. There is even an iPhone app which can shoot and then uplink to Sienna in just 2 button presses, and many Canon DSLRs and compact cameras write video to SD cards which could be loaded onto and edited with iMovie on iPad before uplinking to Sienna via the cloud.

Once you have your Sienna FileFlow linked to the cloud, this opens up all kinds of powerful mechanisms for remote media submission, including bridges to User Generated Content, uplinked using web forms or via email. Of course Sienna FileFlow can 'normalise' the media format to your station standard automatically.

Sienna can also mark up UGC and quarantine it until it is reviewed. Much of the UGC will have already been GeoTagged by a smartphone and will therefore contain the most useful piece of metadata that you are likely to glean from the average citizen journalist. As submission of this UGC content is unmanaged, being able to
Geo-Search in the database is essential.

Sienna Distributed Media Cloud
LINKING REGIONAL SITES FOR MEDIA SHARING
More and more broadcasters are linking regional sites into a globalised infrastructure to share media and other data. Sienna seamlessly interconnects sites, making sharing media assets an automatic part of the workflow.

There are several mechanisms, including MOS Redirection in the ENPS NRCS, whereby a complete news story can be dragged between rundowns at different sites (and Sienna transfers the media to follow the story automatically). An alternative method driven from the Web MAM interface is called 'asset localisation'. Sienna Systems at different sites contain a 'cloud table' that defines which other Sienna sites it is linked to - this creates a pop-up menu in the search window of the Sienna MAM. Users can search on any MAM they have a login for, and having found an asset and previewed the proxy, they can simply drag the asset thumbnail into their local MAM web window, and Sienna will 'localise' the entire asset, including the High Res, Proxy, Thumbnail and other media representations, plus the asset record itself with metadata and logging data.

Craft Editors can go one step closer, and can press 'Send 2 Editor' from the search results. If they happen to hit a result from a *remote* search, Sienna invisibly localises the asset then automatically adds it to the craft editor as soon as it is ready-it is all driven by one single mouse click. We call this cross-site media linking a 'Distributed Media Cloud', but the same idea also works for truly centralised cloud infrastructure. Sienna is uniquely prepared for even the most ambitious distributed and remote workflows.

Geo-Tagging
LOCATE MEDIA EASILY USING GPS CO-ORDINATES
One of the most useful pieces of metadata for *any* asset used in News is its Geo-location, in other words its GPS longitude and latitude. With this tiny piece of data, a whole world (literally) opens up for contextual searching. Since around 80% of all news is fundamentally based around a specific *location* (scene of crime, event etc) the location actually becomes a primary metadata token, and yet most MAM systems offer no support for Geo-location. Sienna, in contrast, has a rich Geo-location infrastructure which allows each asset to automatically or manually acquire a location, it also allows a 'Geo-Search' function where you can search for assets within a certain range of a given location. Even with no other textual metadata, this type of search often reveals incredibly rich and focussed search results. Once you have tried Geo-Searching you will immediately insist that all your assets are Geo-coded, and again, Sienna makes this process very straightforward.
When checking-in still photo media, Sienna automatically extracts EXIF GPS metadata, which is embedded by many professional and consumer cameras, and most smart-phones. Video camera makers are now realising the potential for GPS in video files and some new Camcorders have built in GeoTagging. iPhones and iPads already GeoTag video recorded with their on-board cameras and Sienna automatically extracts this data. For broadcast video workflows using cameras with no on-board GPS, Sienna has a great solution that uses your smartphone's GPS and QRCode capabilities - at the start of filming, you record this data by pointing the camera at your smartphone or tablet connected to a Geo-Tagging service, this data is then decoded as the media is checked-in to Sienna.

Making the Connections
NEXT GENERATION HARDWARE PLATFORMS
Sienna sites have traditionally been built with Apple XServe hardware and AJA Kona cards for the ingest / playout nodes.With the retirement of the XServe, a new generation of hardware is emerging to take its place within the Sienna workflow.

For high density installations where rack space is at a premium, our tests with the new MacMini Server have proven very successful. Using the excellent Sonnet Rack Mount kit, server density is now doubled compared to the XServe, with a pair of MacMini servers in 1U, side by side. There is greatly reduced depth,weight, power, noise and heat. The CPU performance of the new quad-core Intel i7 server machines, is more than enough for most applications, meanwhile the hardware cost is significantly reduced. There are low cost options for SSD boot drives, and the hardware design is less complex, offering very high reliability. For Ingest and Playout, these machines have the new Thunderbolt interface incorporating multiple 10GBit connections between the server and new Thunderbolt video interfaces, now offered by the 3 major vendors of Video cards. Performance is similar to that experienced with existing PCIe cards, since the Thunderbolt interface incorporates a PCIe bus. The main benefits are reduced hardware cost, increased density (since the small Thunderbolt interface boxes can be mounted behind the MacMini Server rack which is less than 11 inches deep) and reduced heat, power, noise and weight.
All these improvements are very welcome.

In many applications, these MacMini servers can also be used for central Sienna server functions like OriginOne,RouterControl and others.  In some cases, where you have a very heavy secondary transcode or file based ingest transcoding load, you may still wish to deploy the fastest multi-CPU MacPro towers for MediaServices & FileFlow - this tower configuration will now become the exception rather than the rule.
In Summary, cutting edge technologies offer us an advanced successor to Xserve.
A fresh approach, a bright future.

For those of you in countries where there is no iTunes store, here are some direct download links

AUDIO PODCAST 1 Automation Macros
VIDEO PODCAST2 Robotic Camera Control
VIDEO PODCAST3 Archiving

For more information
contact your local Approved Sienna Systems Integrator

For more information
contact your local Approved Sienna Systems Integrator