TVBEurope can reveal more details about the technical infrastructure which will be used to produce the host broadcast for this summer’s Olympic Games in London, writes Adrian Pennington.
Some 300 EVS XT series servers will be deployed onsite across the venues and in the OB vans for live replays, highlights editing, and content management. Footage will be managed on the XT3 servers in the AVC-1 OP1A format at 1080i resolution. A further 12 XT3’s will be installed for ingest and playout.
The massive central media server in the International Broadcast Centre, which was previously composed of XT series, will, for 2012, will be composed of an XStore SAN storage system offering 5,600 hours (360TB) of hi-res HD video in AVC-I.
“Because the requirement in terms of size and capacity of the storage is so huge, we needed to introduce a new and proven nearline storage solution,” explained EVS marketing director Nicolas Bourdon.
He said that perhaps the biggest challenge will be managing the multi-stream aspect of the host production in which multiple HD-SDI feeds from the venues are distributed four different ways around the IBC. Aside from hi-res storage on the XStore SAN, the multiple feed recordings will be made available in lo-res H.264 for local and distant browsing; all media will be made available to Avid Media Composer systems for rights holders to file, review and import; and all media will be made available to a data centre which includes logging information and links to the lo-res storage.
For the first time rights holders will be able to remotely review, via EVS IPBrowsers, any media available in the media server and to view, select, cut and import lo-res material for local production.
A Broadcast Data Feed (BDF), which includes scheduling information, will incorporate the Olympic Data Feed (ODF), a comprehensive and constantly updated information asset on athletes and competitions, plus graphics and metadata, all provided by Deltatre.
The BDF is translated into readable metadata allowing broadcasters to schedule information based on timecode for logging operations on IPDirector. In total, there will be 40 IPDirector logging stations used during the Games.
A further two IPDirector systems will be used for scheduling and monitoring ingest, eight more for browsing, and another pair for media management and format changes.
For rough cut and craft editing Avid systems will be linked to the EVS media storage. Avids will be used for the multilateral editing operations, but are also proposed as one of the options for rights holding broadcasters to browse and access the central media server.
ENG content is being acquired on Panasonic P2s linked to Avids. The 3D content will be stored and managed at the IBC on two XT3 servers, each with six inputs and six outputs, with IPDirector used for clipping.
