ESPN live production goes tapeless
Feb 23, 2007 8:00 AM
The EVS XT[2] server is at the heart of ESPN's move away from videotape for producing its live, multivenue events. Pictured is an edit suite set up on-site in a hotel conference room.
ESPN's recent live coverage of the 11th annual Winter X Games from Aspen,
CO, was more that just a spectacle of athletic prowess in the snow. It
also provided the opportunity to experiment with a virtually tapeless
post-production environment, providing a template for how most remote
events will be produced in the future.
Perhaps the biggest feat was putting
together a system that equaled a traditional all-digital studio environment.
The technology was not new — video servers, nonlinear edit systems and a
shared storage environment — but it has rarely been
used with such tight integration and technical sophistication.
Material from
each event was captured on Sony BVP-900 hard cameras and BVP-950 hand-helds with
an assortment of Canon lenses at three venues via on-site production trucks
(ND-2, SS-12 and SS-16) provided by NEP Supershooters. This footage was stored
locally on EVS XT servers. Program feeds, wow reels and melts were transferred
via XFile network to the main production truck (SS-25) that served the anchor
elements of the on-site broadcast center. This center also included a core
signal routing framework that was set up by NMT Productions, with Bexel
Broadcast Services providing additional XFile and IP Director facilities within
several NLE edit rooms built out in conference rooms in The Inn at Aspen
hotel. The truck housed 11 EVS XT[2] servers that stored and transferred
the material as Motion JPEG files. Both clean and dirty program records were
also recorded on the truck's XT[2] servers.
Inside the hotel portion of
the broadcast center, 18 EVS IP Directors and three EVS XFile archive devices were set up in
edit bays, screening rooms and at logging stations. These devices served multiple functions — transferring media between venue mobile units and the broadcast center mobile unit, moving media between the EVS network to the AVID unity network and
logging the raw programs and ISO feeds from the individual venue. Additionally, these stations could transfer media between the active EVS storage
network and a 9TB Windows-based server with the combined capacity of 30 EVS XT
servers.
This allowed
ESPN editors working in 11 edit rooms (with two Avid Symphony and 9 Adrenaline
systems) on an Avid Unity server environment in the broadcast center to access clips and create finished segments for air instantly.
Edited segments were pushed back
to the EVS XT [2] network in the truck and played back directly to air or
sent to the venue trucks' XT network if they were being incorporated into a
larger venue segment.
EVS servers handled the bulk of the data while the
extended storage array Windows server was used for accessing offline clips from
past events (for adding background perspective to segments on particular
athletes) and for archiving.
The most significant challenges
facing this new workflow were configuration issues, such as getting all the
systems to communicate and work together. EVS was able to provide a custom
application to help automate the file transfer processes between the mobile
truck XT system, the BC truck XT[2] system and the Windows server.
While the
Winter X Games coverage was handled and broadcast in SD, ESPN is making plans to
produce the Summer X Games completely in HD as part of the network's
companywide initiative to broadcast all programming in HD.
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