Sky Sport Deutschland has installed 12 IP-native Lawo diamond broadcast mixing consoles to optimise its sports coverage and television workflows as part of a comprehensive overhaul of its technology.
The broadcaster’s set-up also includes Lawo Power Core units as DSP engines, which provide the diamond consoles with expandable I/O connectivity for AES67, MADI, analogue, AES3 and Dante sources and destinations, said Lawo.
For broadcast control, Sky is using Lawo’s VSM system (Virtual Studio Manager) for IP-based broadcast infrastructures which provides integration and support for custom workflows.
“The infrastructure needs to provide the highest possible degree of technological integration,” said Christian Barth, director production platforms, origination and distribution at Sky.
“Scalability also played an important role, as the envisaged mixing consoles needed to cover anything between mono voice-over assignments and Dolby Atmos productions while being easy to operate. The diamond makes it easy to map Sky’s custom workflows.”
Florian Hennig, head of production architecture at Sky, added: “Sky has developed a tightly integrated audio-processing stack. It therefore makes sense, for example, for the sound engineer to hear the effect of how their mixes hit subsequent audio processing stages in the monitoring chain, and to tweak the settings accordingly on the mixing console. With its versatile DSP offering, the diamond eliminates erstwhile audio workflow limitations. Also, in light of the migration towards more and more remote production scenarios, different timing planes with sometimes significant offsets need to be aligned – and the diamond does this very well.”
The new set-up is currently running in parallel with the existing infrastructure until Sky has completed its technical transformation, said the company.
“Preparations for the installation took around a year, during which all workflows were scrutinised and the complete infrastructure and functionality as well as VSM control were set up from scratch. During this time, our team got to know the system so well that it is now able to manage the entire setup on its own,” explained Barth.
