CTV at the Winter Olympics
May 1, 2010 12:00 PM, By Michael Grotticelli
The broadcaster produces a miracle on ice (and snow).
Canadian network CTV produced and broadcast 4800 hours of coverage during the the Vancouver Winter Games.
To call the technical feat that CTV accomplished in covering, mostly live, this year's Winter Games impressive is an understatement. In building a 40,000sq-ft temporary HD-SDI facility at the International Broadcast Center (IBC) in Vancouver to support 11 television, radio and online networks, what the network did was downright Olympian.
This was the first major Olympics production for CTV, Canada's largest privately owned network, since the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary. (The network had a limited role at the Winter Games in Lillehammer in 1994 and the Barcelona Summer Games in 1992.) The previous Canadian rights holder was the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. This year, the network produced and broadcast 4800 hours of coverage, including the opening and closing ceremonies as well as men's hockey. (In previous Olympics, the host broadcaster and NBC usually handled the production, and the other broadcasters used that same feed.)
This year, the network was a founding member of the Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium (OBMC), the official host broadcaster, in partnership with multimedia provider Rogers Media. Together, they provided coverage in English, French and other languages on multiple platforms from Vancouver to accommodate Canadian viewers. The OBMC was formed to support 11 television channels and one radio network, with CTV's temporary facility sustaining all of them. Literally every second of Olympic competition was available live on radio, TV or online during the Games. The network was responsible for more coverage than NBC or any other broadcaster.
Allan Morris, senior vice president of engineering, operations and IT at the network, said that although planning had occurred 18 months before, most of the technical facilities were designed, configured and tested months before the start of the games in a 13,000sq-ft warehouse in Toronto across the street from the network's main broadcast and production facility. The various systems were laid out and connected to replicate what they would be doing in Vancouver for the Winter Olympics. In October 2009, once it had been tested and the staff trained, the equipment was packed into 16 tractor-trailers and shipped off to Vancouver, where it took six weeks to reassemble in the IBC. Crews and talent began showing up in late January.
Temporary broadcast-quality facilities, permanent results
Six studios and seven control rooms were built in Vancouver at the IBC, including five main control rooms, like the one pictured here, to support the five main OBMC members’ live coverage.
Six studios and seven control rooms were built at the IBC. There were five main control rooms for the five main OBMC members — CTV; V, a French network; The Sports Network (TSN); RDS, the French version of TSN; and SportsNet, Rogers Cable's sports channel — and two studio and two control rooms at the Whistler Resort, which was home to many of the downhill events. These remote operations were fully accessible from any control room at the IBC facility and could be closely monitored for internal use via a 180-channel IPTV system.
Production personnel sitting at any desktop in the IBC could see any network, any channel and any venue with the click of a mouse. This included talking with venue production personnel via intercom or VoIP phone while watching the images from the camera as they came into the IBC. People could also look at the incoming IPTV signals on larger monitors using Amino boxes attached to televisions. This saved lots of time and greatly increased efficiency.
Some consortium members also had control rooms off-site at their respective home facilities, so signals were sent from Vancouver to the network's main production facility in Toronto and then on to the distribution platform of choice.
Tapeless production control
The equipment racks used during the Winter Olympics were configured and tested inside a 13,000sq-ft warehouse in Toronto (across the street from CTV’s main broadcast and production facility) months before, then packed up and sent to Vancouver.
The control rooms featured Ross Video Synergy production switchers, Lawo signal audio consoles, Harris Inscriber G7 graphics (created with various applications on Macintosh workstations located adjacent to the control rooms), an Inscriber Connectus centralized graphics management system, an EVS (4 × 2) XT[2]+ replay system, Evertz MVP and VIP multiviewer software displayed on Panasonic flat-panel plasma HD displays and TVLogic monitors in critical viewing areas. Evertz supplied nearly all signal-processing equipment. The control rooms also used a large RTS digital intercom system (576 × 576), as well as Harris Videotek and Tektronix test and measurement gear.
Forty-two Hitachi SK-HD1000 HD cameras with Canon lenses, on tripods and handheld, were used in the studio and at many venues. In the field, operators used 15 Sony XDCAM HD camcorders with Canon lenses.
The primary workflow for broadcasting in HD was a tapeless environment — there was one Sony HDCAM and one Betacam SX machine just in case — so that everything that came in never touched videotape. Sources coming in from fiber and satellite feeds, on-site production trucks (supplied by Game Creek Video based in the United States and Dome Productions in Canada) and other sources were routed through the various control rooms. For complete redundancy, all events took two separate paths using dual Evertz routers (one with a large 576 × 576 matrix and 6000 × 6000 audio matrix), video servers and production switchers to protect against system failure and ensure that the network never went off the air.
Comprehensive centralized storage
Harris was a major supplier to the OBMC, providing integrated broadcast and production systems that allowed the network's team to centrally receive,manage and create program elements and distribute them to multiple stations across Canada. The equipment package included NEXIO AMP advanced media platforms with Velocity HD editors, which were used to build video clips for all program platforms in both English and French. Harris NetVX transmission systems using MPEG-2 4:2:2 at 50Mb/s delivered all content back to home base master controls across the country.
The company's equipment also supported the consortium's online coverage on CTVOlympics.ca and RDSolympiques.ca with a backup control system for FTP file transfer. The system consisted of NEXIO Remote software, which monitors and controls channels on servers over a local area network, and the NEXIO PlayList event-sequencing application, which enables clips to be selected from the database and arranged in any order for frame-accurate transmission.
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