RTR Sport Bets On EVS For Transition To HD

RTR Sport, a company of the VGTRK (All Russia State TV and Radio company) holding, and Qualitron Oy, the integrator who will be in charge of supervising the project, have opted for EVS servers and solutions to equip their new High Definition broadcasting project.
The technical challenge for RTR is major, with a first phase focused on building refurbishment; overall system and workflow re-design of both their production and 24/7 playout facilities; and implementation of a new highly scalable mobile set for Outside Broadcast operations, specifically to cover the Olympics in Beijing.
The human challenge is by no means less important, as their staff, experienced mostly with 4/3 SD with mono audio, will have to switch almost immediately to 16/9 HD with 5.1 audio.
As usual for live events, deadlines can't be postponed: 08/08/08 is the first day of the Olympics, and everything has to be ready on time.
This will be a major breakthrough as, for the first time ever, dedicated Russian coverage of the Games will be provided across the country in High Definition.
In Shablovska, RTR Sport Headquarters in Moscow, the ingest and front-line of replays and highlights will rely on EVS' XT(2) production servers managed by the IPDirector suite and several LSM applications.
These will be complemented by XStore(2) media servers, featuring SAN architecture and the "format-independent" CleanEdit suite.
CleanEdit will not only allow much wider access to selected XT(2) content, using proxy management, but will also ensure incorporation of any ENG (e.g. the latest HD XDCAM) and near and off-line content (e.g. XF(2), for the mobile set; tape library, via Front Porch DivArchive integration, for the sport room).
Hugues Lambert, Sales Manager of EVS Eastern Europe, said: "We've been looking forward to initiating the collaboration with RTR Sport for many years. Since the very beginning, Qualitron has remained convinced of the quality of EVS' solutions and the benefits we could bring to this particular project.
"Now that we've been granted this chance to work together with RTR Sport/VGTRK and we know this could be just the first step in an expanding partnership, it's up to us to continue to earn their confidence. This is a particularly busy year for EVS but I'm pretty confident the EVS' team will continue to deliver!"
RTR has been working with tapeless technology for some time and realised that the adoption of a longer-term storage system (digital archive) was of the utmost importance for their new sport room.
EVS Broadcast Equipment is a leading designer of hardware and software for the production and playout of sport, news and TV programmes in both live and near-live environments. Further information is available at: www.evs.tv.
Qualitron is a leading Finnish engineering and marketing company providing equipment and system level solutions for broadcast television, video and audio production industry. Further information is available at: www.qualitron.fi.
(KMcA/JM)