Lawo helps CTV Montreal TV expand production for sports and more

As properties of Canada’s Bell Media (a division of BCE), TV station CTV-Montreal, the local CTV affiliate, and sports TV broadcaster RDS (Le Réseau des Sports) reside in the same production facility. Recently, CTV-Montreal added a 48 fader Lawo mc²56 production console along with an additional 16 fader remote bay located in the video control room.

Using L-S-B Broadcast Technologies’ VSM (Virtual Studio Manager) software and the Ross Overdrive automated production control system, CTV-Montreal’s new production capabilities are fully integrated with the five mc²56 consoles of RDS via Lawo’s Nova 73HD router core—thus facilitating the complete sharing of resources between the combined six studios.

Martin Côté, manager of Engineering Projects for Bell Media at CTV Montreal and RDS was tasked with the planning, purchasing,and deployment of equipment at the two stations. “In the last 2 years,” Côté explains, “RDS upgraded all of its facilities. We introduced five new control rooms, all equipped with Lawo mc²56 consoles.  All of the surfaces were linked together using the Nova 73HD router core.

“The idea was to be able to use any of the studios, feeds, cameras, etc. with any control room and Lawo surface. To accomplish this, we needed to bring all of our sources into a central router. We used VSM to manage all of this. The system provides users with an intuitive GUI (graphical user interface) exposing only the tools they require for any given project. We recently added this sixth mc²56 console at CTV-Montreal with the same mindset—having the ability to share resources with the rest of the infrastructure.”

As a CTV affiliate, CTV-Montreal produces daily local news while RDS is a French language sports oriented specialty TV operation. With the complete resource management integration of the six Lawo equipped control rooms, the system provides a great deal of structural redundancy and offers flexibility for special projects such as big sports events, elections, etc.

There is one redundant VSM system that services all of RDS and CTV-Montreal for XY control, Ross interfacing, studio delegation, camera tally delegation, and handling. “The combination of the Lawo consoles and Nova 73HD routers provides great flexibility and a high level of redundancy,” confirms Côté.