26
MANAGEMENT
October 2016
Axon’s Cerebrum control and monitoring
helps CTV deliver Open Golf coverage
For the second year running, Axon
Digital Design's Cerebrum control
and monitoring system helped CTV
Outside Broadcast (OB) make light
work of the “extremely complex”
technical infrastructure required
to deliver the Open Golf Championship.
Because of an 11th hour decision by the tournament organisers
to appoint European Tour Productions (ETP) as host broadcaster,
along with Sky Sports and NBC
Sports, time was of the essence
for those who were responsible
for broadcasting the tournament.
OB specialist CTV, for instance,
had only a week in which to build
a small broadcast village, revealed
Richard Morton, CTV’s engineerin-charge. He added: “In previous
years, we used OB trucks to deliver
the live feed, but this year the scale
of the facilities required was beyond the limits of a truck.
“Instead, we built a temporary
broadcast centre with a main production gallery, a main submix and
Axon’s Cerebrum control and
monitoring system provided
the heartbeat for CTV Outside
Broadcast’s recent coverage of
the Open Golf Championship.
a super-iso/replay room for ETP’s
world feed. There was also a main
production gallery for NBC Sports,
plus an iso/replay gallery and a
main audio mix area.”
With more than 160 cameras on-site, CTV had to monitor
some 1,000 pictures at any one
time. The task was so large that it
required the installation of two
Cerebrum systems — one for ETP
and one for NBC Sports. These controlled two SAM hybrid routers, two
large Calrec audio matrix, 22 Lawo
V-Pro boxes, over 80 Evertz VIPs
and two GV K-Frame switchers.
The systems also handled feeds to
numerous CTV OB trucks looking
after other broadcasters.
By acting as the nerve centre
for all routing functions, and linking together all the main broadcast
equipment from numerous major
manufacturers, Cerebrum enabled
CTV to deliver a highly efficient
workflow encompassing elements
such as hybrid router control, tally,
UMD, multi-viewers, monitoring,
remote colour balance and the
control of bunker cameras, as well
as Panasonic pan-and-tilt cameras.
Attributing the success of the
broadcast to the flexibility provided
by Cerebrum, Morton said: “Cerebrum's advanced functionality and
broad range of features simplifies
multi-device control, making it very
simple for multiple engineers to
operate the system and give clients
everything they asked for in a very
short timeframe.
“Also, because we had two
Cerebrum systems operating at
once, we had built-in redundancy.
Nothing did go wrong, but it was
reassuring to know we had backup
in the event of any problems.”
For this year’s Open, Axon also
supplied 40 CCP-4200B panels with
42 high-density buttons, which
were specifically designed for CTV.
“These were fantastic because they
allowed us to maximise the button
density in our technical real estate,”
Morton continued. “We had more
than 150 EVS record channels running continuously, but with these
panels our EVS operators could
select every shot and every camera
angle very quickly.”
Familiarity with Cerebrum also
helped to alleviate the nerves
arising from a number of new
clients to serve, revealed Morton.
Because Cerebrum had already
been installed i n CTV’s largest OB
truck, a good understanding of
the system and its capabilities was
already forged. “Also, we tested the
water with Cerebrum at The Open
last year and it performed really
well, so we were very confident
with our infrastructure,” Morton
concluded.
Global clients turn to Aspera for media transfer and delivery
A number of global media companies have
adopted the Aspera Files hybrid cloudbased content sharing service, a Softwareas-a-Service (SaaS) offering on IBM Cloud.
These include Dubai-based Beelink,
which produces and distributes exclusive
content, mainly Arabic drama series, from
its studios in Egypt.
To meet an expanded production
schedule, Beelink replaced its legacy HDD
distribution, which often resulted in un
acceptable delays, with Aspera Files. The
company was in full production within
hours, with nothing to provision or deploy
except an install-on-demand browser
plug-in.
Beelink organised episodes in folders on
a per series basis and used the "share" facility with view-only permissions to distribute
only authorised content to its customers,
who are required to log in for content access audit purpose.
Assets were uploaded from Egypt over
a 50Mbps line and then downloaded by
Beelink customers at the highest speed
from Aspera Files, which is built on top
of Aspera FASP high-speed transfer technology. Episodes reaching 17GB were
uploaded to Files and downloaded within
25 minutes by customers running 100Mbps
lines.
A new pay-as-you-go option for Aspera
Files further enables media companies —
from small to large — to take advantage of
the Aspera platform with a cost-effective
offering that scales with their business, while
a brandable workspace model accommodates the project nature of the digital media
business, said Aspera.
In Australia, Fox Sports Australia has
adopted Aspera Shares and Aspera Pointto-Point software to simplify and accelerate
the process of programme sourcing.
With Point-to Point, content providers
initiate and manage secure high-speed
transfers. Once the transfer is completed,
administrators at Fox are immediately
notified that the content is ready. The files
are then passed through a series of steps
including transcoding and QC checks via
Telestream Vantage.
Once editing and processing is completed, the finished content is uploaded
to Aspera Shares for distribution where it
can be browsed and downloaded at high
speed by users with appropriate access
rights. The Aspera implementation immediately improved the way Fox Sports
Australia receive and process content, said
Judd Walliker, broadcast services manager
at Fox Sports Australia.
He added: “We’re able to receive programmes faster than ever before and no
longer have to search for physical content.
The Aspera solution is trusted and widely
deployed in the media industry, so we
could leverage digital transfer with multiple
partners.”
Caton Technology powers Guangzhou Broadcasting Network’s
transmission of Rio Olympics
For its round-the-clock coverage
of the Olympic Games in Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil, Guangzhou Broadcasting Network (GZBN) deployed
Caton Technology’s LCP-300 video
transmitting system and Cydex file
transfer software for high-speed
transmissions back to China.
Video feeds from a Sony camera were sent to a Caton LCP-300
4G encoder and transmitter, which
then transmitted the encoded video
signals to a server in Guangzhou via
a 4G network. For edited video files,
they were transferred to Guangzhou via open Internet through
the AES-256 encrypted Cydex file
transfer software solution.
Cydex’s per formance was
“smooth and stable”, and provided
GZBN stable transmission support
while providing the broadcaster
with cost and manpower savings
from production to post, GZBN
reflected.
A GZBN spokesperson continued: “We chose to use Caton’s
technology because it’s supportive
and powerful, and surpassed our
needs. As this worldwide sports
event was very important to all
media professionals, we’re responsible to provide the best broadcast
service to our end-users. To al-
low them to be the first ones to
watch the latest sports results, we
required the highest quality and
most capable network transmission system.
“When we used Caton’s R2TP
technology via 4G network, the performance was efficient and saved
us from using a lot of expensive
equipment and human resources.”
GZBN also used Cydex’s F2TP
technology to transfer large files of
some segments of the Rio Games,
which GZBN found to be more
efficient than the traditional File
Transfer Protocol (FTP).
All in all, Caton’s software and
Guangzhou Broadcasting Network attributed its successful coverage of the Olympic
Games in Brazil to Caton Technology’s solutions.
hardware solutions provided GZBN
with an end-to-end transmission
solution, which provided “the most
reliable and flexible performance,
and over 10 times more efficiency
than other software solutions in the
same network”, the GZBN spokesperson concluded.