Live From Paris 2024: RT Overhauls Audio Workflow, Adopts Dante for Olympic Games

Live from Paris 2024: RT overhauls audio workflow and adopts Dante for Paris Games By George Bevir

Friday, August 9, 2024 - 13:44

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RTE live operations support supervisor Michael Moriarty at the Paris 2024 IBC

RT has made some major upgrades since Tokyo 2020, including the introduction of a Dante-based audio routing infrastructure.

Paris 2024 has seen the largest ever Irish contingent travel to the Olympics, with 133 athletes competing in the Games. To cover the action, RT is delivering over 250 hours of live action from France across RT 2 and RT Player, including three live daily programmes.

Speaking at the IBC in Paris, RTE live operations support supervisor Michael Moriarty said: We've come a long way, technology wise, from Tokyo. Then, everything was analogue, and jack patching for audio was a manual, labour-intensive task.

This prompted an overhaul of the audio infrastructure, including the adoption of a digital Dante-based system which has allowed RTE to transition from an analogue system to a remote-controlled digital network.

With Dante, we never touch the front of our racks, said Moriarty. Everything is now managed remotely, significantly reducing the need for manual intervention.

RT is using NEP Connect as its service provider. Via that connection, RT is sending four HD video streams back to Dublin, with two HD video streams from Dublin back to Paris. A separate trunk is used for audio over IP, which is an AQ-based system, with 16 channels of audio from Dublin, and 16 channels of audio back to Paris. Codecs are all analogue, with analogue to Dante conversion via Tascam units.

RT also recently upgraded its routing infrastructure in Dublin to SMPTE 2110, with EVS Cerebrum used as the orchestration tool.

We've a remote panel into Dublin from here, which we can control the switching on our lines coming from Dublin to here. So that's been a really useful tool, because it means in Dublin, we don't need somebody sitting on the desk, all day and all night.

And taking on Dante as our as our audio routing and distribution has been a game changer. I wasn't in this role for Tokyo, but speaking to some of the team they would have to look on patch panels to find audio and headphones so just being able to see it all easily and distribute it easily has been really effective.

RTE is taking some 82 feeds in from OBS with a MADI trunk for commentary positions from various stadiums around Paris.

In terms of marrying the audio with commentary it's a bit of a combination with some done in Dublin. We've got 16 satellite feeds coming into the building via satellite, and the bulk of what goes out to air comes in via satellite. Anything extra, if we have some ad hoc sport that isn't available on the MDS (multichannel distribution service), we'll switch it here and send it back via fiber.

But all of our commentaries are coming by here in the IBC. The satellite feed comes in to Dublin, they strip out the international sound and then add in our commentary from the venue.

Looking further ahead to Los Angeles (2028 Summer Games), Moriarty said it could be possible to cover the Games with a greatly reduced amount of kit.

He said: I've learnt a lot from my first Olympics, and we could probably do what we are doing today in Paris in LA with a lot less equipment.

We could take the OBS cloud service and take it all directly via the cloud. We could still have connectivity in LA, and a hub, but it could be very much remote which would save shipping, manpower and so on, because a lot of the operation can be done from home.

For the Winter Olympics (Milano Cortina 2026) RTE is planning to take the OBS cloud feed as a test ahead of the LA Games.

We never have an IBC presence at the Winter Olympics, so we'll look at how the workflow works for us and if it all stands up and if it does, that will be our test done.

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