VTM Kicks off Sky Sport s Live Football Coverage of the Austrian Bundesliga with EVS

(05/09/2014) VTM Production-Service GmbH, the Austrian-based television production services company, has selected EVS, the leading provider of live video production systems, to deliver the live sports production workflow for Sky Austrias new sports center in their Auhof studios in Vienna. The new production infrastructure was designed to enable Sky Sport Austria's live coverage of this year's Austrian Football Bundesliga.

The end-to-end workflow is a complete EVS live sports solution. Covering multiple feeds ingest, live production asset management, shared storage and remote browsing, highlights editing and playout, the live production workflow integrates seamlessly with Sky Sport Austria's post-production facilities in Vienna.

VTM had a number of key specifications for the new workflow, said J r me Wauthoz, market solution manager, sports center at EVS. These included the ability for the solution to handle multiple media formats, and facilitate the access and easy exchange of media content between production and post-production.

Since the launch of our new sports center, the new live production infrastructure provided by EVS has given us the opportunity to enhance every stage of our workflow, said Wolfgang Vala, managing director, VTM. The seamless integration between live production and post- production is crucial to an efficient workflow. In particular, the EVS shared storage solution enables our post team to have instant access to content. We are now set up to work much more smartly, which brings so many productivity benefits across the whole production chain and means we can now focus on enabling a better end product for Sky Sports.

The technical workflow

Ingest

Four EVS XT3 live production servers are configured to record four signals each, giving VTM the capability to ingest up to 16 live feeds simultaneously. The servers also provide dual XDCAM HD/ DNxHD encoding for greater interoperability and responsiveness during the live production. EVS' IPDirector product asset management suite (Live PAM) controls the servers and manages content, including the Ingest Scheduler tool to dispatch the incoming feeds to the nearline storage EVS' XStoreHE and the Auto Clipping module to integrate Opta log entries (keywords describing match action) and associate them with video clips to help the content search.

Live production

The XT3 servers are equipped with LSM remote control panels to produce slow motion replays and quick turnaround content. The control panels are integrated with tablet-based LSM Connect software, which allows operators to swiftly manage clips and create playlists for highlights packaging.

Shared storage and remote browsing

All ingested feeds are streamed to an XStoreHE. The EVS shared storage solution is based on SAN storage architecture and has a capacity of more than 100TB. More importantly, it enables the post-production team to have instant access to content for advanced editing. The streams are monitored from a single interface EVS' Xsquare gateway solution which also generates lo-res proxies of the recorded material.

EVS' IPBrowse application is used by the production team and journalists to quickly and efficiently search for relevant material as lo-res proxies on the shared storage from their desktop or connected laptop. Users can also use the browsing tool to select content and send it in high resolution to different destinations, including edit stations at Sky Sport Austria's Vienna facility.

Playout

Studio playout is carried out from an XS server controlled by the IPDirector suite. EVS' Live PAM allows the production team to browse content on the shared storage, including finished edits from post-production, and transfer the selected material to the EVS server for playout.

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