HD Production and Playout System

MTV3 and Canal+ already offered a comprehensive sports supply in 2011. MTV3 displayed Formula 1, the WRC rally, boxing, Ice Hockey World Championships and the World Cups for all types of winter sports. Canal+ broadcast games from all the leading European football leagues, tennis and NBA basketball. To meet all these production needs, two systems were built, which together form a production system with a total of 50 HD channels for storage and playout

The systems are based on a cluster of EVS XS and XT2 + production servers. Workflow is managed by IPDirector, EVS’s production and material management tool, which are used e.g. recording scheduling, material and metadata management, and previewing, among other things. IPDirector also acts as a link between EVS production servers and Final Cut editors.

All editors have an EVS export plugin in Final Cut that allows the finished material to be published directly from the edit to EVS servers for playout. The playout can already be started during the transfer, only a few seconds after the start of the transfer. Also, the material recorded can be used in Final Cut with a delay of only a few seconds, even if the recording is still in progress.

EVS’s versatile access rights settings allow very precise restrictions on the visibility and usability of channels and the usage of material. Some of MTV3’s system playout channels are subject to broadcast control. With access rights, own environments can be built for different productions. A total of six studio observatories were built for Blue Media for various productions, all of which can control the desired part of the system. Matrixing and monitoring were performed with Evertz products.

“Because of the new broadcasting rights, we needed a flexible system to make it easier to manage material during multiple simultaneous recordings. We ran tests on our EVS XT2 server at the time and found out how efficiently EVS worked with edits and playout automation.”

Markku Ryöti
Head of Technical Design
MTV3

The MTV3 and Blue Media systems are connected via EVS’s XNet2 network. With a network for media transfers, EVS servers can drive material out of other servers on the network. Of course, in this respect, too, access rights can be fully determined according to needs.

”The best aspects of the system are speed, flexibility and reliability. The workflow has sped up significantly and we can customize the assembly to meet the needs of different productions.”

Kari Andersson
Production Manager
Blue Media