ZDF, ARD select Avid for Winter Games workflow

Avid creation, management and distribution solutions will be used to power the live production infrastructure for ZDF’s and ARD’s shared German television coverage of the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia, from 7 to 23 February 2014.

At the heart of the production workflow is Avid’s production asset manager and shared storage systems, which will be integrated with third party solutions to enable the German public broadcasters to deliver on-demand, anywhere, anytime coverage to millions of viewers in Germany.

ZDF and ARD are sharing facilities to benefit from greater operational synergies. They required a fast, efficient and robust workflow to cater to a wide range of content and distribution demands: from on-the-fly editing, graphics creation and processing to production, management and distribution of content. Together, the Avid and third party integrated workflow will enable faster and more effective collaboration among all members of the production team across a complex, multi-location environment.

“This project with ZDF and ARD, which showcases how our solutions tightly integrate with third party applications, is another clear example of why broadcasters around the world are choosing Avid’s proven and trusted platform to manage and drive their content creation and distribution needs for large events like the Winter Olympic Games,” said Tom Cordiner, vice-president of international sales at Avid. “By selecting Avid to enable the TV coverage of another high-profile sporting event, ZDF and ARD are perfectly placed to deliver the highest quality content to its viewers regardless of where or when they want to access it.”

Systems integrator Wellen+Nöthen delivered the production capabilities based around Avid Interplay and Avid ISIS 7000. Editing is handled by Media Composer Nitris DX systems, while iNEWS news production and several Interplay clients are used for news production.