Connect and Produce Anywhere: Teamwork makes the dream work on a living lab test at Formula E for both project partners and champions

Sean Jones is involved in the IBC Accelerator, Connect and Produce Anywhere , working with audio company, Lama to showcase how a full broadcast can be encapsulated entirely on software hosted on a private cluster

The Connect and Produce Anywhere (CAPA) IBC Accelerator pulled its team together recently to conduct a real world, living lab test to see how the project could scale up for a premier event production.

The team took over a room in the media compound at Formula E’s London E-Prix at Excel on 20 July. CAPA was at Formula E at the behest of the electric racing series’ sponsor, Google. The test ran over the course of the weekend using commodity hardware running on the Google Cloud cluster.

Many of the project partners were on site at Formula E, including Zixi, TSL, Lama, Vizrt, Techex, and two graduate trainees from project champion, Channel 4, both of whom are broadcast engineer degree apprentices, with Tia Shenton project managing the weekend, and Sean Jones working with Lama on the audio side of the project. Additionally on site were Techex, which was bringing in and managing the Formula E video sources, Tag Video Systems providing multi-viewer capabilities, and TSL which bought in tally and control.

On Vizrt’s role in the project and live from Formula E at Excel, Liam Hayter, product manager at Vizrt, says: “We’re basically providing vision mixing with Vizrt TriCaster Vectar, so that’s our live production system that typically lives in AWS instances, but obviously there’s a good opportunity to bring that and run it in the Google Distributed Cloud edge cluster. So we’re providing that for the vision mixing, and we’re also doing instant replay with our Viz 3Play system. So that’s giving us live replay and speed control of the sources. And then finally, we are also bringing some connectivity with the Viz Connect Tetra product, so those are where we can interface with protocols, other standards, and also provide remote connectivity so we can easily connect this up to 5G, work with constrained bandwidth through NDI, and reduce the amount of bandwidth that we need on the location. So that’s kind of some part of the elements that we are providing in here to interface with everyone else.”

Tia Shenton, Channel 4 broadcast engineer degree apprentice, was project managing the IBC Accelerator Connect and Produce Anywhere team at Formula E’s London E-Prix

On what Techex is bringing to the party, Rosanna Prada, senior broadcast systems engineer – who was on site guaranteeing the physical kit during the live test – comments: “What Techex is providing is somewhere to host the physical hardware in between taking it out and testing it in a live situation. There’s a bunch of servers and switches that we host in our lab, in inbetween events so that they can be used by the wider CAPA team to set stuff up and then test things ahead of us taking it out into the real world and seeing what happens with it.

“Then the other part of that Techex is providing is also our software, Techex Edge, which we’re using for its video transport. In this particular implementation here at Formula E, we’re taking in a multicast video from Formula E, and then we’re turning that round to SRT to distribute out.”

Meanwhile, Jeroen Dixon, CTO at Lama, comments on what his company was doing at the Formula E test weekend: “So we’re taking in the audio, and we’re actually doing two parts. We are converting the Dante audio into NDI audio and then sending it to the cluster. And then on the cluster there’s the rest of our software stack running and that is to make all the connections between different feeds and the mix and to do the actual mixing.

“And actually here we’re also testing AutoMix, which is what we’ve developed together with Eurosport; we’re basically doing two mixes in parallel, one manual mix and one auto mix. That’s our thing that we’re doing here.”

CAPA will be presenting some of its learnings at the IBC Show in Amsterdam in September