This May’s Festival de Cannes was, as usual, one of the year’s premier red carpet events and attracted movie stars and media attention from worldwide. The festival was televised by hundreds of broadcasters and hosted thousands of TV, radio, online and print journalists.
Meeting the demand for moving images and commentary from the Festival from media sources worldwide was a challenging task. The Festival de Cannes TV channel needed workflow automation to create and deliver content was appropriate for all its customers worldwide. In reality, this meant a very large number of media files in a broad diversity of file formats, each suited to a multitude of delivery platforms, broadcast formats and languages. This created a mission critical requirement for a high throughput, multi-format media processing and transcoding platform.
For the last three years, broadcast solution provider Videlio-Cap’Ciné has looked to Telestream for support. This year, at the heart of its content creation workflow, Cap’Ciné installed a Telestream Vantage media processing system powered by Telestream’s LightSpeed servers to encode file-based content for the Festival de Cannes TV channel.
Workflow automation
Using Telestream Vantage, Cap’Ciné created a single multi-language file with eight discrete audio channels (four stereo pairs). This involved transcoding the video once, producing four different output files, each in a different language.
Telestream’s x264 codec was capable of feeding HD (720p) content to all YouTube and Dailymotion platforms that were covering the major news of the Festival de Cannes. Similarly, high and low res files were made available to a huge number of news agencies, broadcasters and various media partners affiliated to the Festival de Cannes.
Using Vantage, Videlio-Cap’Ciné created a customised ingest workflow to gather all the files coming from different cameras. Only four days were needed from setup to ready on air, including testing.
“We were faced with a vast number of file formats from many different cameras such as Panasonic P2 AG-HPX250, Sony FS7, Sony Alpha7, Sony PMW300 and PMW400, plus all other files coming from web/ftp,” said Benoit Bonardot, in charge of post production for KM Prod, which produced the content for the Festival de Cannes TV. “Fortunately the LightSpeed K80 server and Vantage were perfectly capable of ingesting and processing all those different formats at high speed, using only two workflows which greatly simplified the task for our staff.”
The channel was running live for 13 days during the Festival and the LightSpeed K80 server was used to archive files afterwards, providing reference assets for Canal+, Orange and Le Festival de Cannes itself.
Telestream has been a long-term partner of the Festival de Cannes. “In previous years we have supplied our Episode multi-format video transcoder and now we have evolved to Vantage in order to meet the growing global appetite for coverage of this stellar event,” commented George Boath, VP international sales, Enterprise Products at Telestream. “The content transformation challenge was considerable but well within the capabilities of Vantage and LightSpeed. We look forward to growing our relationship with the Festival de Cannes in the future.”
