Recently I was reminded of an interesting bit of stuff hanging off the BBC R&D website. It covers the BBC’s new automated tapeless production system. For an overview there is, as one might expect from the BBC, quite a nice 8 minute video available.

The production system is interesting not only because of the way it allows almost immediate access to logged and tagged takes from a filming but also because of the heavy use of Free and Open Source software in the pipeline. For example, from the site:

Our file server, MediaHarmony, is also based on commodity hardware and open source software. It uses a SAMBA file server with virtual file system extensions to provide the additional features needed to support multiple editing clients.

Even better, from the point of view of a video geek such as myself, is that the guts of this pipeline has been released by the BBC on SourceForge.net. Props to the BBC R&D guys for that!