Viacom s Atlas Truck Carries the Weight of MTV s VMAs, Enables New File-Based Workflows

While heavy-hitting pop icons Beyonc and Rihanna stole the show on stage at MTV's 2016 Video Music Awards on Sunday, another heavy hitter made its VMA debut behind the scenes: Viacom Media Network's Music and Entertainment Group's massive, 4K-capable Atlas mobile unit. The truck, which debuted in January for Fox's Grease Live! telecast, served as the production hub for the first VMAs at Madison Square Garden, powering one of the largest and most complex shows on the annual live-production calendar.

Every time we do this show, we think it can't get any bigger, and then, every year, it gets bigger, said George Epley, SVP, technical and production operations, Viacom Media Networks Music and Entertainment Group, prior to the show on Sunday. It just keeps growing. This is my 27th VMAs. Things have changed an awful lot since 1989, and, once again, this is the biggest one we've ever done.

Viacom's Atlas truck worked its first VMAs on Sunday.

In addition to the live linear telecast, Atlas produced MTV's red-carpet preshow, a streamed behind-the-scenes show, and a rooftop performance outside MSG, as well as a four-camera postproduced 360-virtual-reality show that will be made available on-demand. On top of that, Viacom Media Networks continues to ramp up content exchange between the truck and its Times Square production facility to streamline its postproduction and quick-turnaround VOD operation.

When I started working on VMAs 10 years ago, we had two feeds leaving the building: transmission and backup, said Jeff Jacobs, SVP, production planning, strategies, and operations, Viacom Media Networks Music and Entertainment Group. Sunday, we have 46 feeds leaving the building, including transmission and backup, preshow transmission and backup, digital behind-the-scenes show, Facebook Live, Twitter, Snapchat, and 30 other multiplatform distribution sites. Ten years ago, the only real way to get out was uplink and fiber. Now we are using IP to push our content and deliver it to fans.

Atlas's acoustically treated audio-mixing room features a massive Lawo audio board.

A Wholly Tapeless Workflow

The two-trailer Atlas mobile unit is built around a Sony XVS 8000X switcher and a Utah 3G 1156 1156 Scientific 400 series 2 baseband router (Epley and company have opted not to go with an IP router until the technology matures further). Inside the B unit's custom-tuned and acoustically treated audio room sits a Lawo mc 66 MKII featuring 80 faders, intended to provide a real studio mixing environment, according to Epley.

Most notably, Atlas features an entirely tapeless workflow with 10 Sony PWS-4500 production servers and 24 channels of Pronology mRes multiresolution encode/record systems (soon to be expanded to 32). Running on the Pronology media-asset-management (MAM) system, the mRes records an uncompressed high-res file, an edit proxy, and a live-web-streamable proxy in real time for each SDI input channel. These proxies are fed to the postproduction team at MTV's facility at 1515 Broadway, streamlining the editing process. The high-res files are recorded to Small Tree TitaniumZ-5 40-TB hard drives, which are transported manually to 1515 Broadway, so that the proxies can be replaced with high-res content.

The Atlas mobile unit houses Pronology MAM and 24 mRes multiresolution encoder/recording systems.

The integration with postproduction is key, says Epley. We send low-res proxy, so they are editing the first act by the time we get to the second act. This is a completely file-based workflow, delivering the low-res proxies as the show's going on to post and then walking away with multiple 40-TB hard drives.

He adds that, within the next two months, all Music and Entertainment Group trucks will be using Pronology mRes as its primary record workflow.

[Previously], our normal protocol was [to record] clean program, dirty program, backup, and then iso every camera; that would be 32-33 tape machines for this show, says Epley. Now we are in there doing hundreds of streams in different file formats. The file-based workflow wasn't something that slowly ramped up; it changed everything immediately.

Beyond Atlas: Plenty More Trucks, Live 4K Cutout

In addition to Atlas, which served the MTV linear telecast, Viacom rolled out its Nereus truck for the red-carpet VMA preshow and Magnus for the MTV digital and behind-the-scenes streaming production. Also on hand was Audio 8 (featuring two audio consoles) to mix the sound for multiple stages simultaneously, as well as the 24-ft. Local truck to help cover Nick Jonas's live performance outside MSG during the show.

In all, MTV's linear telecast deployed more than 30 cameras: 21 standard cameras for the primary show, an additional eight for the Jonas performance, and several POVs. Also inside MSG were a Cablecam aerial system, a Towercam, a rail-mounted camera system on the stage, two jibs, two RF Steadicams, and several robos.

The streaming behind-the-scenes production featured its own complement of 22 robos and POVs stationed throughout MSG.

MTV's secondary compound featured Viacom's Nereus and Magnus trucks powering the red carpet and streaming behind-the-scenes shows.

For the first time, the production team deployed a 4K-cutout application (using the Sony PWS-4500 server and HDC-4300 camera) live during the VMAs to provide more flexibility in its coverage.

4K cutout gives us some different camera options, Epley pointed out. Because of the nature of the 360 set, you get into some limitations of viewing angles and how many cameras you can put out on the floor. So it's just given us the opportunity to cover things differently with one camera. Spike Sports has been using [4K cutout] on the tape-playback side, and, certainly, you see it a lot around [the industry], but this

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