After the success of its Roland Garros and Tour de France coverage, France Television has reiterated its confidence in EVS technology by conscripting EVS to produce ‘France 2 Foot’. The programme presents results and summaries of the Ligue 1 and 2 football matches played each weekend, as well as extracts and images of the matches of the on-going season, clips of which need to be online at the click of a mouse, writes Adrian Pennington.
“We are proud of the strong relation and level of collaboration we have achieved with France Television and VCF”, said Eric Karcher, sales manager of EVS France. “We are continuously looking for workflow improvements and ways to offer productivity through our work on major sports events. We are very pleased that they have trusted us with the workflow for this new project.”
An efficient tapeless workflow was needed to digitalise and archive all the matches as well as create edits and highlights. France 2 chose an EVS workflow which consists of three 6-channel XT[2] servers to loop-record all matches, and one 5TB XStore[2] storage system, based on SATA technology, to mass store all the matches.
Metadata describing the action during each match is created by France Television’s operators using their own XML file-logging system directly integrated with the XT[2] servers. Once created, keywords and descriptive metadata allow producers, editors, and operators to instantly retrieve any footage recorded on any XT[2] server on the network, as well as in XStore[2] storage systems. In addition, live feeds recorded on any EVS XT[2] are made immediately available to all Avid stations thanks to the new live streaming application of EVS’ XFile software. Thus Avid editors can retrieve any media by either researching the logs or simply by browsing on the streaming live feeds in order to build their edits.
“This agreement is a major step in the development of sports production at France Television,” said Henry Alexander, general manager of EVS EMEA. “Digitising all of their studio production will provide faster access to all matches and better content delivery for the end viewer.”
As in the past, the study and set up of this solution was accomplished in partnership with VCF, a French audiovisual technical service provider, which hosted the system and provided the required technical support to France 2 during the first months following the launch of the programme. This same EVS-VCF partnership has proven to be successful on the last four broadcasts of the Tour de France.
