Reseau France Outre-mer (RFO), owned by the France Televisions group, has purchased a range of Avid systems to create a digital production workflow for nine stations in French-speaking territories around the globe – the deal enables RFO to centralise its operations in a single location while improving production and workflow for all of its stations, regardless of their local geographies.
To support the full roster of programming across its network – where each station produces a mix of local news, magazine shows and commercials – and broadcasts national content created by France Télévisions and TF1, RFO will deploy multiple Avid and former Pinnacle systems for acquisition, post production, media management and playout. The installation is currently underway and expected to be complete by Autumn.
“We needed a solution that would allow us to keep all local and national RFO programmes in one central storage system located in our Paris headquarters, but also enable us to broadcast different RFO channels from one location, with schedules planned locally via a communal database. In addition, we wanted complete integration between our production and post production operations,” said Christian Augereau, technical director, RFO. “We’re also able to meet our infrastructure needs because Avid’s systems are HD-ready today. This allows us to evolve quickly toward HD when the time comes.”
The workflow solution at RFO’s headquarters is based around a Unity ISIS shared-storage and networking system. This will interface with eight MediaStream 8000 servers, which include 20 channels of ingest and 60 output channels, and will utilise an additional 20TB of centralised storage to handle approximately 5,000 hours of MPEG-2 IBP content at eight megabits-per-second.
In addition, 16 Avid editing systems will connect to the production network, including a combination of NewsCutter Adrenaline and Media Composer Adrenaline systems. Unity MediaManager and TransferManager systems will facilitate media management for the workflow, including two-way transfers of files between Unity ISIS and the MediaStream servers.
