38 TVBEurope The Workflow


www.tvbeurope.com April 2013


LDK 3000 cameras were the choice for both production studios at BTV


Baltijos TV opted for JVC Multiviewers in the main production gallery Lithuania upgrades to HD


In 2012 Lithuanian broadcaster Baltijos TV decided to upgrade its broadcast systems. Philip Stevens looks at the latest Baltic state to switch to high definition television


AT THE beginning of 2012 Lithuanian commercial broadcaster Baltijos TV (Baltic Television or BTV) made a decision to upgrade its broadcast system to coincide with analogue switch-off. Based in the country’s capital, Vilnius, BTV operates two studios from which a range of general programming is produced. An essential part of the upgrade process was the requirement to switch from tape resources to a totally digital file-based production output. “We put our requirements out to tender and five systems integrators were considered for the upgrade project,” states Gintaras Šiau iulis, technical manager at Baltijos TV, UAB. “There were three systems integrators from the Baltics and two from Western Europe. We asked each to propose at least one solution from different vendors.” As a result of that tendering


process, Hannu Pro was chosen as the systems integrator (SI) for the task. Staff from both its head office in Riga, in neighbouring


The new production gallery features a variety of Grass Valley equipment


Latvia, and the local Vilnius facility carried out the work. According to Kalvis Baumanis, a board member of Hannu Pro, some specific challenges exist when working in the Baltic countries. “Budgets are tight because the market is small, yet equipment costs are the same as you would find in multimillion media projects. The small market also means fierce competition and SIs need to win every project to sustain their activity.” He continues, “Where customers are moving straight from the VTR


age to nonlinear production their expectations are very high. Together with vendors we provided equipment trials and presentations to convince BTV that our proposed solution was the best way of addressing their requirements.” These tests showed that a combination of Grass Valley systems offered the best way forward for the Baltic broadcaster. At the heart of the solution was the Stratus media workflow application framework. “We are able to provide a full


line of integrated solutions, ranging


from cameras to playout, that use the most modern software technology available on the market,” states Pascal Dememe, Baltics and Eastern Europe sales manager, Grass Valley. “These included the Stratus nonlinear production tools, Karrera Video Production Centre switcher and the Smart Playout Centre integrated playout system with K2 Edge.” Šiau iulis was particularly


impressed with the ease of use of the system. “Stratus is intuitive with a really short learning curve. It can be used by everyone for


almost any task in daily production and allows us to achieve more with fewer people involved.” Baumanis says that it provides all the functionality, such as browsing, searching, metadata logging, restore-archive, assignment list creation, playlist, storyboard editing, removable media/VTR ingest, and feed ingest scheduling, from one customisable graphical interface. The package includes an eight channel redundant K2 Summit 3G system with 26.6TB RAID6 storage (this provides 1320 hours of SD or 700 hours of HD content) supporting internal proxy generation and dedicated 10GigE FTP server. Also incorporated is an integrated Edius Elite NLE system.


Octopus and Orad The upgrade project also covered the newsroom, production studio, broadcast infrastructure equipment, as well as playout system installation. For the newsroom operation, Hannu Pro opted for the Octopus6 newsroom computer system (NRCS). “Octopus was proposed by the SI as turnkey project part,” says Šiau iulis. “It was important to us that Octopus has the ability to


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