An IP Director station at ARD-ZDF.
SOCHI German public-service broadcasters ARD and ZDF have a large Winter Games presence, which makes sense given that in Sochi, Germany was once again likely to be at or near the top of the medal count.
While the engineers in charge keep a watchful eye on technology and the advantages it brings to a broadcast, technical changes are taken incrementally. In Beijing in 2008, they made the jump to tapeless, albeit in SD. Vancouver saw a leap to HD tapeless production, and in London less than two years ago, HD production met the volume of events that comprise a Summer Games.
Given the relatively brief period between a Summer and a Winter Games, Sochi saw only small changes to the production infrastructure.
Servers of course remained central for ingest, playout and production at the IBC, and were used mostly in a highlights capacity at various venues where the broadcasters had a presence. New this time was a refinement of the broadcaster's core Avid and EVS infrastructure.
While in the past ingest and playout was managed by both Avid and EVS machines, in Sochi all ingest and playout duties went through the broadcaster's core 17-machine complement of EVS XT3s.
We make all the ingest by EVS, transferring to the Avids, said Patrick Jung, EVS administrator for ARD-ZDF since the Beijing broadcast. And now all the playout is done by EVS systems.
Editing duties also saw refinement, with the Avids focused on the craft editing they are so good at, and an increased use of EVS' more basic, fast-turnaround IP Edit software for day-to-day spots.
The Germans also were again using the IP Edit software in an audio capacity, as a supplement to fast-turnaround linear editing using traditional EVS edit controllers. The video playlist is taken in to an IP Edit and the audio off tube commentary and more is quickly added.
THE WORKFLOW
In Sochi, ARD/ZDF recorded and logged incoming feeds on the EVS systems, with material transferred on to Avid/Isis storage for editors to create finished pieces. If the programming schedule required speedy airing, material was cut and played directly from EVS servers.
ARD ZDF used 17 EVS XT3 servers.
ARD/ZDF also deployed a few stations of the IPBrowse service from host broadcaster OBS. This service allowed RHBs to look at lo-res browse copies of content before picking only needed content for HD-res delivery to an EVS server in their facility.
What other software was deployed in Sochi? Fifteen EVS IP Director seats had browsing and administrative functions, and were also used for playout. Jung whose title is EVS Administrator also said that the administrative software to manage and configure a networked EVS infrastructure was helpful. This software can check all the machines for stream status, temperatures, and all the things that need to be monitored.
In Sochi ARD ZDF started evaluating a host broadcaster service called the Broadcast Data Feed (BDF), and this was used in Sochi. The BDF has within it all the logging data from the massive OBS pool of EVS servers, and more, as metadata tied to the video timeline. It even provides clip duration and captures key frames.
What might be on the roadmap for the future? One possible improvement would be better connectivity between the broadcaster's facility in the mountain cluster of venues and the IBC located where the stadiums and Olympic Park are. Currently the mountain facility can access IBC XT3s over SDI in real time, but file transfers would be a much faster possibility for a future Games.
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An IP Director station at ARD-ZDF. 
