Qvest Media teams up with ARD and ZDF for major summer sports events

For the transmission of the 2016 UEFA European Championship in France and the summer games in Rio de Janeiro, ARD and ZDF are going to cooperate once more with Qvest Media. The company will provide the broadcasters with a connected HD production and broadcasting infrastructure. In addition, a Qvest Media support team will help the engineers of ARD and ZDF with the installation and the operations at the venues.

Rio de Janeiro is the first city in South America to host the summer games, during which 306 competitions will take place involving 10,500 athletes from 205 countries. For 17 days, ARD and ZDF will alternately report live about the events. The International Broadcast Centre (IBC) in Rio Barra, where the live coverage will be produced, will be equipped with production, transfer and storage systems by the technology partner Qvest Media. The equipment will be used for the European Soccer Championship in France, before the logistics team of ARD and ZDF send it via aerial cargo to Brazil.

Qvest Media will provide ARD and ZDF with a set-up that has been proven at similar major sport events, consisting of EVS and Avid technology that is tailored to the broadcasters’ production requirements. The central data ingest, highlight editing and playout are undertaken on an EVS installation comprising 14 EVS IPDirectors, eight XTAccess systems and 21 XT3 production servers with Multicam 14 software. The EVS XT3 servers have been specially equipped for sports broadcasts with new 10 GigE interfaces and the latest audio I/O technology. Thanks to the investments in additional EVS servers and a major upgrade contract, Qvest Media now has one of the most modern pools for EVS technology in Europe.

Reporting and post facilities

For their extensive editorial reporting and post production, ARD and ZDF have chosen a networked Avid infrastructure with 28 connected craft editing stations and an Avid central storage solution with a capacity of 576TB. The file ingest into the Avid environment is possible via XTAccess from the EVS network or MOG F1000 multi-format systems. This allows the editorial team to smoothly import and provide video material by using Avid interplay. At the non-linear editing suites which are equipped with Media Composer workstations, the material can be accessed from the ISIS production storage. As soon as it is edited, it will be passed to the EVS playout server via interplay transfer engines.

Furthermore, with its technology pool Qvest Media also operates the graphics editing. Real-time graphics are created as part of the report with the Viz Artist and Trio tools from Vizrt, which have access to a fully redundant graphics hub.

Whilst the system is being set-up in Germany, Qvest Media’s support team will help ARD and ZDF with the technical configuration of the systems. At the sites, engineers from Qvest Media and the broadcasters will work closely together throughout the installation proccess.
Qvest Media is also supplying equipment from other manufacturers such as Riedel, Evertz, Sony and Panasonic and Snell Advanced Media (SAM). While Riedel delivers the intercom platform for internal communication in the IBC, the distribution of video signals is achieved by multiviewer systems from Evertz. Furthermore, the VTRs and recorders are from Sony and Panasonic, whilst the Alchemist and Kudos high-end format converters come from SAM.
When the Summer Games wrap-up in Brazil on 21 August , the equipment will stay there for four more weeks so that it also can be used for the XV Paralympic Games in September.