Live from the Rio Olympics: EVS Serves Up Maive Tech for First Tapele Games

For the first time ever the wide range of production and technical services provided by Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) that forms the backbone of Olympic coverage around the world is completely tapeless as a combination of dozens of EVS XT3 servers, hundreds of EVS IP Directors, and other EVS technologies play a key part in leaving tape behind. This is much, much larger than the system for the London games as there are more feeds and the Multi-Clip Feed services didn't exist then so that makes 12 more feeds to log, says Luc Doneux, EVS, chief commercial officer. And there are all the mixed zones and interview areas. On the first two days there were 70,000 logs per day.

Getting the EVS side of the facility up and running required 15 EVS support personnel to be on hand (there are currently nine EVS staffers managing the project during the games). There are 33 EVS XT3 servers on hand for OBS at the IBC, providing 167 channels of ingest (there are also more than 160 IP Directors throughout the facility). Most of the servers are six-channel units while the mixed zone units feature 12 channels.

Joshua Symon, Dylan Cameron, Luc Doneaux, and Vincent Ronveaux of the EVS Support Team

The content on the servers are not only available to the Olympic rights holders inside the IBC but also to 56 broadcast facilities around the globe that have remote access (including IOC facilities in Lucerne, Switzerland and OBS facilities in Madrid, Spain). Aspera file acceleration technology plays a role in making sure that content is quickly and securely available where needed

One interesting aspect of the build out was that the core EVS units were actually in use for the Euros but the Olympic workflow needed to be proved out and tested while that tournament was going on (it ended on July 10). A temporary SAN was built and the entire OBS workflow ran on that temporary SAN for the test.

The OBS server room includes 33 EVS XT3 servers.

We waited for the servers to come from the Euro and swapped over to them on July 25, says Doneux. And then we had to install all of the EVS servers for the for the rights holders and some of them weren't even here yet.

In fact, some of the rights holders didn't get online until the day of the Opening Ceremony. But that is the nature of the beginning of an Olympics: a frantic rush to get up and running but literally thousands of people and hundreds of organizations. It's still early here in Rio and the pace is beginning to settle down as early kinks have been ironed out.

It's all gone pretty smooth actually but it's always about the bandwidth load and the on an API level the exchange of metadata between various solutions, says Doneux.

The OBS logging area features 55 EVS IP Director workstations and dozens of loggers attaching metadata to incoming event feeds.

Logging is a crucial part of the tapeless workflow. Within the OBS technical area is a logging area with 55 IP Director logging stations so that metadata can be associated with content for each distribution circuit from the venues. Additional IP Director logging stations are on hand to handle the Multi Clip Feeds, quality control for interviews, and then scheduling and media management, bringing the total number in the logging area to roughly 70.

At previous Olympics any station here would need to be associated with a specific distribution circuit but now the system is much more flexible and any station can be tied to any circuit, says Doneux.

Also on hand is a station where mistakes can be fixed. For example, if a logger forgets to change the name of a swimming event or associate the material with the wrong heat the metadata can be quickly fixed.

EVS C-Cast technology is also part of the OBS workflows for hockey, rugby, football, and golf coverage. The first three sports find the technology being used to create multi-angle replays of goals that are then pushed through the OBS publishing system and made available to users of the Olympic Video Player (OVP) as well as to broadcasters in the IBC.

Golf coverage, meanwhile, will use C-Cast to help create video clips and packages about players and coverage that was not able to make it in live event coverage. Golf is also making use of EVS Multireview technology which allows for an editor to call up all the camera angles from, say, the 10th hole and then quickly see them all on the screen at once via a multiview and then quickly cut a clip making use of any angles available.

LINK:	http://www.sportsvideo.org/2016/08/09/live-from-the-rio-olympics-evs-s...
	See more stories from svg

Most recent headlines