At this year’s NAB spring show, I spoke to a great many NexGen users who were curious about Zetta, and I thought it would be nice to do a series of articles that help people understand the NexGenetics that have made their way into Zetta and how they work in the new platform.
This time we focus on the “DRR” module in NexGen. DRR is a term which came from NexGen’s predecessor and meant “Digital Reel to Reel”. A comfort term for old school broadcasters, but we were constantly explaining what it meant. Master Control had a term for the same concept called “Background Recorder” or BGR, and this is quite a bit clearer so we went with that in Zetta.
But don’t let the name fool you. Background Recorder in Zetta can do quite a bit more than just record things in the background. Unlike DRR, in Zetta’s BGR you can execute any command. Meaning macros, command events and even play audio on a play device if you have some sort of timed event that you want to play and keep it out of the hands of the studio. In BGR, you can record from the same audio card at the same time, overlapping is no longer an issue if you wish to record from the same source to multiple files. It’s more like a powerful task scheduler that can record.
Zetta also adds in some new recording functionality like “On Demand Recording” which is to say you can take a GPI event and have it kick off a recording immediately, without having to be pre-scheduled. You can also record to locations *outside* of Zetta. Which means that instead of recording to an asset inside the Zetta database, the audio simply gets recorded to a location, named a certain way (according to record parameters). This location could be an FTP server for podcasting type operations, or simply a local folder of archived recordings for use in promo production. And of course, it has features that you would expect such as timed or GPI based recording of assets, and the ability to switch routes.
This is not your father’s Background Recorder, this is the new Zetta BGR.