ERR Estonia goes live with L-S-B VSM for UEFA European Championship qualifier

Estonian public broadcaster ERR took to the air with a new Virtual Studio Manager (VSM) system in its OB IRIS truck covering the UEFA Euro 2016 qualifying match between Estonia and England last month, as England laboured to a 1-0 victory thanks to a Wayne Rooney goal against 10-man Estonia following a player sending-off.

As host broadcaster almost all cameras went through ERR for this high profile sporting event. The installation used a combination of LSB’s LCD button panels (LBP Series) alongside existing Grass Valley CP panels. This meant ERR had greater flexibility with the LBP panels while saving costs and keeping their existing panels interfacing to VSM. ERR took advantage of VSM’s platforms using redundant HP DL320 servers built in a load-balancing cluster to ensure reliability whilst keeping both weight and size to a minimum.

The connected devices consisted of a range of manufacturers including Evertz, Grass Valley, Lawo and Avitech. The core functionality required to control these devices was realised by delivering: Evertz VIP 12 split multiviewers system for Tally/UMD; Avitech Rainier cascaded multiviewer system; Grass FValley Kayak 250 video mixer tally and Aux bus routing and Label Transfer; GV HD SDI Trinix 256 x 256 video router control; and Lawo MC256 audio mixer/router with routing and parameter control.

Senior engineer in charge Toomas Õigus described the system as “so big with so many possibilities; we are extremely happy”. VSM is a complete user configurable-system, meaning engineers can manage and prepare configurations both on and off line for productions. Using out of the box logic engineers can load and save production set ups at a push of a button reducing both time and efforts onsite.