Live from London: Grass Valley Exhibits Olympic Effort in London

With more than 200 cameras, three dozen production switchers, and 30 replay systems in venues across London, Grass Valley is out in full force at the Olympics. The company is currently supporting the broadcast backbone for numerous events and broadcast-rights holders, including Russia, Brazil, and Estonia.

“We are honored and very proud to have Grass Valley’s leading-edge technologies and solutions in use in and around London by a large number of our customers,” says EVP Jeff Rosica. “Some of the world’s leading broadcasters, OB vans, and rental facilities are on-site providing excellent broadcast coverage of the events, and we are pleased to be a part of the excitement.”

For every visiting rightsholder using Grass Valley gear, the company works alongside the broadcaster to determine the workflow, size, and scale of the production and then design the system according to those needs. For NTV-PLUS and TV Record in particular, Grass Valley was charged with designing a system that could handle large amounts of content from ingest to rebroadcast.

Russian satellite broadcaster NTV-PLUS worked with Grass Valley to build an integrated production infrastructure based on Grass Valley’s STRATUS Media Workflow Application Framework. The Russian-rights holder required a fast and reliable workflow that could also integrate with its existing Grass Valley EDIUS non-linear–editing workstations.

Grass Valley leveraged the existing system with a new K2 SAN for recording and playout and now supports 13 GV STRATUS workstations for viewing and simple editing by the large number of editorial staff.

TV Record, Brazil’s second-largest television network, was also in need of a completely file-based workflow. Leveraging both Grass Valley’s technologies and expertise, the Brazilian-rights holder built a fully networked storage area network (SAN) based on Grass Valley K2 Summit media servers and featuring numerous seats of Grass Valley’s Aurora Digital News Production (DNP) platform.

In addition to its on-site presence, Grass Valley gear is hard at work in numerous production facilities supporting the Games. TV Record’s São Paulo production facility installed a fully networked Grass Valley Aurora workflow to support its TV Record 24 News Channel.

Grass Valley is supporting both ERR’s coverage of the Olympics from London as well as in the Estonian capital, Tallinn. A client of Grass Valley for many years, ERR tapped the supplier to create a production complement that could handle both live coverage and preproduced segments.

Estonia’s rightsholder is currently using the K2 Dyno Replay System, seven LDK 8000 Elite cameras, and a Kayak HD production switcher in Tallinn.

Beyond the visiting broadcast-rights holders, Grass Valley gear is supporting the broadcast infrastructure at various venues throughout London, including Olympic Stadium, North Greenwich Arena, Basketball Arena, Old Trafford, Handball Arena, ExCeL, and Wembley Arena.

The Opening and Closing Ceremonies, gymnastics, basketball, soccer, handball, table tennis, and badminton were all covered by equipment provided by Grass Valley.