Studer's Vista 5 Conducts Swiss Football Broadcast Traffic

Ringier TV is one of the leading content producers for Switzerland’s television channels, notably SF and Sat.1 Switzerland, and its value-added sports packages are made available to the public via the Teleclub subscription service, or over IPTV via Bluewin TV (Swisscom’s new service).
Ringier TV is making clever use of a Studer Vista 5 digital audio console to create the pay-TV channel content for the UEFA Champions' League, the Swiss national football league and Switzerland's National Ice Hockey League A.
At its production studio in Zurich, Ringier embellishes the broadcast video received from the sports stadia via SRG Swiss Broadcasting's control centre, the CNCT. Working simultaneously on numerous games from the Champions League, Ringier engineers add before/after show trails, captions, scores and other statistics; mid-match, there is the expert discussion, which will be mixed along with the rest of the audio track including the live commentator from each stadium, and a studio commentary. And, as this is Switzerland, theoretically the studio commentary for each match has to be made available in three languages (German, French and Italian).
Ringier TV has used the Studer Vista 5 digital console to automate the audio-follows-video process, and add the audio extras to the package.
Instead broadcast consultant Martin Reich proposed the use of a Vista 5, which was then supplied by Dr W.A.Günther Audio Systems, Studer’s Swiss distributor.
Typically, on Champions' League fixtures, each game is mixed down on the Vista 5 from ten inputs to four stereo outputs. On a busy day, eight football matches will be handled simultaneously with ice-hockey games, and the only human adjustment will be the mix level of the commentators' speech! According to Daniel Berthoud, the Studer-based audio control system could handle many more games; in fact, the only limitation is the maximum of 16 lines that can be sent to the carrier Teleclub.
(DS)