36 TVBEurope
Tour de France: The Workflow
Low-cost recording outpaces peloton By David Fox
THE ATOMOSfield recorders have been popular (with more than 10,000 sold worldwide) as a low-cost way of adding higher quality recording to small cameras and DSLRs, but the company’s recent move into outside broadcast and studio recording, with its rack- mountable Ronin recorder, has opened up a whole new market. One of the first Ronin users is
Luxembourg-based FreeLens Television, which recently put two units to the test on the Tour de France, where they were part of a robust workflow that had to survive constant movement from stage to stage during the world’s biggest mobile sports event. FreeLens provided all the
production, post production facilities and technical crew for SBS Australia’s coverage of the Tour de France. It was working directly for the US/French production company Woods TV, which produces the Tour for NBC Sports and SBS. “But as they have a huge production for NBC Sports, they asked us to make the SBS part, which is a very small set up compared to the huge NBC production,” explains FreeLens’ production director, Yann Figuet. This meant providing live
inserts, ingest of the live international signal, ENG and post production. “The challenge of producing on the Tour de France is not only to find the proper technical solution, it’s also to find the perfect installation to set up, mount and de-rig every day during the 21 stages of the race. As SBS was also looking for some working spaces, we decided not to use an OB unit,” says Figuet. Instead, they installed the equipment in a trailer with two foldable sides to extend from around 12sqm to more than 40. FreeLens crews have worked on the Tour for the last 15 years for different TV stations, but this was the first year it provided facilities to SBS Australia.
ProRes workflow They decided to use Apple’s ProRes LT codec for all of the workflow from shooting to
On the road: An SBS interview position at the Ax 3 Domaines ski resort in the Pyrenees
broadcasting, as the 100Mbps compression converts well to the 15Mbps HD signal sent over the satellite, but it requires relatively little bandwidth and storage for the quality it offers. The ENG crews used
Panasonic P2 cameras equipped with Atomos Samurai recorders, allowing them to record both on the P2 cards and Samurai, for extra security. “The pictures are immediately available to be copied into the server. Ingest time of a simple copy of ProRes LT file into the server is much quicker than the transfer of P2 material,” he explains. The international clean feed is
also recorded in ProRes LT in the central server, which is an Apple MacMini with 30TB of storage in a Thunderbolt-equipped Promise Pegasus R6 Raid storage. Ingest of the live feed is made using a Blackmagic Design UltraStudio 4K plugged in via Thunderbolt on the server. “We use Softron Movie
Recorder to ingest the live feed. Movie Recorder allows edit while ingest. The editing stations connected onto the gigabit network have immediate access to the pictures while the stage is on. An extra ingest station is available to record any other format coming from a third party connected to an XDCam and P2 VTR. All sources are routed through a 16x16 matrix.”
The two Ronins (a loan demo model and its own unit) were connected to the 16x16 router, and were able to record and playout any sources, such as playing out an interview that had been recorded on a Samurai. “We also use the Ronin as a spare recorder to have a ProRes LT
record of the race in case the server goes down. It could also be a separate recording made from one of our fibre links. When the finish line is too far from the TC compound we install a fibre link to give our ENG crews the opportunity to playout an interview directly into the server,
Recording a piece to camera near the fearsome Mont
Ventoux for SBS Australia with a Samurai on camera
making footage available for the edit stations or live broadcasting,” he says. During the races they had live stand up positions where SBS reporters could comment to camera. The cameras at these positions were linked to the production unit via fibre using a Camlinx system from VolAmp. Figuet says it is similar to a Telecast Copperhead system, but less expensive. “In the unit you have two-way HD-SDI, intercom, two-way analogue for IFB/return audio and analogue mic. It also includes a data channel for camera control with RMB or equivalent. Very good equipment.” The return feed with English commentary was available for the live position on a 17-inch monitor. Some of the content was pre-recorded locally on the camera using the Samurai or in the production unit using the Ronin, which he says have been very reliable. “We are recording a minimum of five hours per day on SSD 500GB drives and we did not lose any frame so far.” Prior to using the Atomos equipment, its previous set up on the Tour de France was much smaller, using XDCam HD VTRs and cameras and ingesting the content into stand-alone Final Cut Pro edit suites. Its workflow now is a great deal more efficient. “Working with the server and gigabit network is a huge gain of time. ProRes LT quality is good enough and the files are not too big. It’s a perfect way to cover an event like the Tour de France where the facilities have to be as rugged as possible. “As the files are available
simultaneously on all the edit stations it is also a gain of productivity. Editors can make stories using the same rushes. We have done extensive tests before the Tour, and the results achieve our expectations. We are able to play, record and replay several flows at the same time without any crash or slowing down.” One of the main attractions of the Atomos recorders is their low cost, and FreeLens bought them “because it’s for us the best
www.tvbeurope.com August 2013
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