64 TVBEurope The Workflow Number One for upgrades
Philip Stevens visits the Moscow facility of Russia’s oldest channel to investigate its recent upgrade towards integrated file-based operations
IT STARTED life as the First Programme of the Central State Television. In 1991, it became the Ostankino State TV and Radio, only to be replaced four years later by Public Russian Television (better known as ORT). On 2 September 2002, ORT was rebranded to Channel One Russia – by which the national broadcaster is currently known. From its headquarters in the Ostankino Technical Centre in Moscow, the station covers around 99% of the country stretching across 11 different time zones. In 2003, Channel One International Network (COIN) was launched to provide a worldwide audience for the station. More recently, Channel One
embarked on a wide-reaching upgrade programme that has been overseen by systems integrator, OKNO-TV. “Our brief was not just to provide a studio upgrade from SD to HD, but also to bring in a new graphics system and the implementation of tapeless production workflows,” reports Mikhail Kalanchekaev, deputy technical director of OKNO-TV. “Alongside those operations we needed to upgrade the ingest and MCR facilities. The broadcaster has set the date of January 2014 to be fully HD in its operations.” Three studios were involved in this aspect of the channel upgrade. In order to maintain the broadcaster’s schedule, one studio was tackled at a time – nevertheless, the whole operation had to be completed within nine months.
Combining functions Sixteen ingest rooms equipped with Grass Valley K2 Summit 3G Solo SD/HD media servers are now available to take feeds from the studios and external
www.tvbeurope.com September 2013
Newsroom 1 and 2: Dalet News Suite is used to handle both domestic and international news arriving at the Channel One newsroom in Moscow
“Shortly it will be possible for all production islands —
EVS, editing, producers and so on — to have
access to archive and manage movement of materials in file format”
Mikhail Kalanchekaev, OKNO-TV
Mikhail Kalanchekaev: “Channel One still has a number of external production companies that produce and deliver on VT”
feeds. According to Kalanchekaev, the ingest operation is used by playout as well as other programme departments. “It made a great deal of sense to have a central ingest point rather than separating out the various operations.” In reality, these rooms combine both the ingest operation with some editing facilities. “Although the main
objective is to ingest feeds and make visual Quality Control checks, we have equipped the rooms with Grass Valley Edius in order to provide minor corrections for the materials. All Edius operations are edit-in- place thanks to the connection to GV K2 video server storage.” Kalanchekaev continues, “These ingest facilities permit all metadata to be integrated with all the ingested material
which allows producers and others involved in programme preparation to have all the relevant information readily available.” Yamaha audio mixers are used, although the consoles’ inputs and outputs are not employed. “We bring in the signals using optics via a MADI connection that enables the audio to be shown on all channels.”
Two of the ingest suites have been fitted with a Lawo mixer for material that involves 5.1 audio. Kalanchekaev reports that there are currently not many transmissions in that format in Russia — the exceptions being special events such as the Olympics. He says that discussions took place with operational staff concerning the
layout of the ingest rooms. “As more and
more computers are entering the production chain,
it was important that the configuration of the facility suited the individual needs of the staff who had to use them. We feel that the job of a systems integrator is to consider such requirements at an early stage.”
Turning tapeless In addition to the upgrade part of the project, OKNO-TV has also been involved in replacing the broadcaster’s VTRs with tapeless technology. “This will be quite a lengthy process.
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