Swedish sports producer Kanal 75 is replacing its entire production infrastructure with a new HD workflow using EVS technology, writes Adrian Pennington. In addition two French horse racing governing bodies are moving to a similar set up.
The new system at Kanal 75 includes XS and XT3 production servers and the IPDirector content production management suite. It will also be the first installation to fully integrate an EVS system with Avid’s Interplay Media Asset Management. Kanal 75 is the first Avid customer in Sweden to adopt Interplay MAM.
Kanal 75 is owned by ATG, the Swedish horse racing betting organisation. Covering around 1,300 Swedish and international horse racing events per year, it produces thousands of hours of live racing content for its own satellite TV service, which is broadcast to off-track betting centres in Sweden, USA, Australia and ten other countries. It also produces TV content for the Swedish public broadcaster TV4 as well as maintaining a large archive.
In its decision to move to full tapeless HD production for both broadcast television and the web, it issued a tender split into two contracts – one for logging, ingest and control room functions and a second for archive and MAM.
EVS had worked with Kanal 75 previously when the company installed equipment for its highlights shows, so says it was able to submit a detailed workflow analysis and design based on its knowledge of the producer’s working methods and requirements. EVS was then able to integrate with the proposed Avid system for the archive and MAM contract.
The resulting installation will be integrated by Danmon Systems and is scheduled to go live in December 2011. It will use XS and XT3 production servers for ingest, production and control room playout both for live and recorded studio programmes.
The IPDirector suite will be used for ingest scheduling, clipping, streaming, production content management and playout control. IPDirector will also handle the logging of races and delivery to Kanal 75’s web distribution platform, which will be linked to ATG’s betting data feed. In addition, file transfer with metadata from the production system to Kanal75’s existing Avid Interplay/ISIS editing platform will be achieved thanks to the EVS/Avid Web Services integration, providing edit-while-capture capabilities. The Avid system will also be able to send finished pieces directly to the EVS servers via Avid Transfer Manager.
The EVS system will integrate fully with Avid Interplay MAM for the first time. Recorded and logged content will be transferred together with metadata to a shared storage and checked in to Interplay for archiving. The production teams can then search for, browse through and retrieve material for their programmes and magazines.
“We record thousands of races each year—both local and international—and needed a reliable, productive, and open media asset management system. Avid Interplay MAM fits perfectly with our requirements and enables us to manage and monetise our media and metadata in ways that we simply couldn’t achieve before,” explained Robert Svensson, Kanal 75’s assistant technical manager.
L’Arc De Triomphe
Meanwhile France Galop and Le Cheval Français, two horse racing governing bodies in France, have replaced their production infrastructure with a new HD workflow based on XT3 and XS servers. These will be incorporated in three new mobile production units.
The live horse racing will be broadcast on a series of French television channels including France 3 and Equidia, and the new systems will also be used for the production and archiving of video content used by the horse racing commission.
Emmanuel Giacotti, Technical Director at GTHP, the facility company that will be operating the mobile units, said: “EVS has been our partner for years, providing reliable technology that performs under the most demanding conditions. And with the power and flexibility of the new XT3 server, we don’t have to worry about future production requirements for quite a while”.
Each mobile production unit is to operate 300 days per year and will use four XT3-LSM systems to ingest live multiple camera feeds, create clips and produce live slow motion replays. In addition, two XS production servers, under the control of IPDirector, will be used to produce and playout playlists. All three units will also be equipped with EVS’ XF2 removable storage for archiving.
www.avid.com
www.cheval-francais.com
www.evs.tv
www.france-galop.com
www.kanal75.se
