Finnish broadcast Yleisradio Oy (YLE), a regular broadcast partner of the International Olympic Committee, will be producing 400 hours of TV programming for audiences in Finland, and client broadcasters in Sweden and Denmark at the London 2012 Olympics. Coverage of the Games is being overseen by Madrid-based Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), the host broadcaster responsible for providing international coverage. Rights-holding broadcasters like YLE will customise OBS’s neutral feed, adding commentary and additional footage for their own audiences. OBS commissions venue production teams from around the globe to produce coverage of certain sports and events, according to their expertise, and YLE has been assigned to a number of Athletics competitions as well as the prestigious Opening and Closing Ceremonies. YLE’s Senior Technical Advisor Matti Helkamaa has overseen the design and set-up of YLE’s 2012 facilities. YLE’s production and transmission unit in the International Broadcast Centre (IBC) is the London end of a workflow that stretches to Helsinki, where YLE’s new HD OBV – the U10 – is being used as production unit for the second feed. In the IBC, Helkamaa has specified a Lawo mc²66 MkII console for YLE’s main TV production. A Lawo sapphire unit is in the audio master control room, handling additional requirements outside actual production audio mixing. A second studio facility has been set up about three miles from the IBC; the City Studio also features Lawo, a networked and remote-controlled zirkon frame acting as an audio interface to the main mc²66 production audio system. In TV, the main feed to YLE TV2/TV1 is bilingual (Finnish and Swedish), transmitted in parallel to the HD network in 5.1 audio format. The second feed, produced in U10 in Helsinki, focuses on Finnish interests for the YLE Fem TV channel. Lawo Nova routers and Line Scheduler software are central to the YLE system design, enabling the pre-prepared scheduled routing. At the IBC, a Nova73 HD matrix routes all the feeds for the TV production and to/from Helsinki. www.lawo.de
