EVS inks huge deal with OBS for 2012
EVS has inked a major deal with Olympic Broadcasting Services to supply kit to drive much of the live and near-live production infrastructure for London 2012, including camera and multiple feed recording, live replays, slow-mo and on-the-fly editing solutions, central media archive, advanced content management and media sharing workflow systems. It’s an impressive list and while nothing as vulgar as actual numbers are being mentioned, EVS confirms that it is a multi-million Euro contract similar in size to that awarded in the run up to the Beijing Olympics.
The result of it all is that EVS will deploy more than 300 multichannel-XT series servers across the venues controlled by the LSM remote system for all slow-motion, super-slow and ultra-slow motion replays over the two weeks of competition. Additionally, based on the EVS servers’ hybrid networking operation system, all live recorded content will be fully controlled using IPDirector for quick highlight editing, first level logging, and fast turnaround media exchange with the IBC production teams (necessitating a total of 50+ seats).
The workflow is going to be different to Beijing as Avid editing is taking the place of FCP for the multilateral operations, and is also being proposed as one of the options for rights holders to browse and access the central media server. File transfer and access between EVS and Avid should be seamless.
Two XT3 systems and two IPDirectors will also be used for 3D input recording and playout.
There are a couple of interesting firsts involved in the deal too. The centrally located broadcast centre will see the installation of the new generation of media server, an online archive and media sharing solution enabling Host Broadcaster production teams as well as broadcast right holders to access all broadcast feeds and complementary camera feeds coming from the different venues, as well as dedicated highlight packages and clips. The media server will be composed of 12 XT3 servers dedicated to live feeds recording, and a live centric near line storage server based on EVS XStoreSAN technology offering a capacity of more than 360TB and enabling the browse and exchange of over 5,600 hours of HD content.
Added to that, in order to optimize media handling operations from any remote location, OBS will also be using for the first time EVS’ new web-browsing interface, IP Web-browser (which is currently in its final stages of development and scheduled for launch around London 2012 time), allowing production teams to review and select media hosted on the central server – based on auto generated proxy files – via the web.