30 TVBEurope The Workflow
www.tvbeurope.com August 2013
The new sports studio showing the remotely controlled Sony cameras Paris Sports Factory
Philip Stevens learns how a specialised management system brought major workflow benefits and also significant cost savings to a new French broadcaster with a four month turnaround from order-signing to going live on-air 24/7, as well as moving to a new site
L’EQUIPE 21, la première chaîne 100% sport, 100% gratuite. One hundred percent sport. One hundred per cent free. That’s the slogan of L’Équipe 21, the French sports channel launched in 2012. To ensure French fans are continuously fed with action and information from their favourite sports, a summary of the sports news is updated every 15 minutes. Earlier this year, the Paris-based broadcaster moved to a new production centre also occupied by the parent company, L’Équipe — the well- respected sports newspaper. “Our two studios are located in the Boulogne,” states Philippe Espinet, chief technical officer of the broadcaster. “One has a fabulous view of the Eiffel Tower, while the other has been built with a virtual set.” The cameras deployed in these studios are Sony BRCH900. These are fully automated through an in-house system and controlled remotely using Wi-Fi. Just one operator controls shots, movements and racking.
The virtual set is built around a Neon trackless system from Hybrid. This unit eliminates the need for both external tracking devices and an external chroma keyer, and enables camera movements to be simulated from a fixed SDI signal. Boards within the equipment allow the VR studio to be controlled through the GPI triggering of the Kahuna 360 vision mixer. The relocation allows the channel to introduce significant enhancements to its production tools, newsroom operations and playout infrastructure. And to do that it turned to the Dalet Sports Factory end-to-end news, studio production, broadcast and media asset management system. “We were determined to
deploy a system that was fully integrated,” emphasises Espinet. “We didn’t want different production silos that existed when the channel started. And there was an obvious operational rationale for this decision. First, the users are primarily journalists and the Dalet system has all the tools
they need within the system. This makes the workflow more efficient and it certainly made the training easier because they could accomplish all their tasks on the same desktop. This was especially important as we had a very short turnaround — just four months — from order- signing to on-air.” Espinet states that the second
reason for an integrated system was
No cache storage In all, 100 Windows clients with desktop editing and Vizrt plugins were installed. Other essentials of the system include 20 web clients, 22 ingest automation, 15 ENG ingest and 10 file-based ingest servers. There are also in excess of 100 back office logical application servers to manipulate video, a Rundown editor, A/B roll
“The Dalet system is not only modular, but it also addresses different market segments,” explains Raoul Cospen, director of Marketing and Business Development at Dalet. “L’Équipe 21 is a typical example. The broadcaster uses newsroom modules, sports modules and other tools that are dedicated to programme MAM activities, such as archive operations like indexing and searching. There is even integration with the traffic system to handle commercials automatically. “The Dalet Brio servers with their 22 inputs and 12 outputs
“There is no bottleneck in the workflow. In fact, we don’t even have a backup system. This is the proof that the system is really stable!”
financial. “A single, main system to run NRCS plus ingest plus production plus playout plus archives results in monetary savings. Separate and multiple systems are also harder to administer and maintain. With a single Dalet system we also have the benefit of support from a single vendor with resultant cost savings.”
playout and eight carts for video walls and the automated playout control of graphic elements. Other basics include integration with a number of other operations — Oracle ZFS storage for the archives, four Xtend for Final Cut Pro, a traffic system, and eight Dalet Brio servers.
Philippe Espinet
are used both for ingest and playout. They are integrated into the Dalet system using API commands. The storage is actually located directly on the SAN, allowing files to be read and written directly on the network.”
Espinet goes on to explain why the Dalet architecture was
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