25 February 2012

Backstage: The Cave

With TED2012 still two days away, the media production team has already been here at Long Beach for three days setting up our operation, and a set of IT volunteers started work two days before that. Above is a photo of one small part of the TED Media Cave, the nexus of all video, audio, and photography produced at TED.

In the picture above, you can see the cloning stations. At each end is a media management station, where video is transferred and categorized. (With 8 cameras on the main stage, there’s a tremendous amount of data produced — probably 100 terabytes by the end of the conference.) The rows of 10 computers and RAID arrays in between are the cloning stations, where video is duplicated and archived. In close to real time, they produce four copies of every bit of video: three here in Long Beach, which will be shipped separately back to our video editors, and one transferred to our office in New York.

The rest of the room contains more 40 computers, some for video editing and encoding (the first TEDTalk from 2012 will be posted Wednesday!), others for photography editing, tech support, and more.

See more backstage photos from the Media Cave >>

Photo: Jason Wishnow.

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