Thomson Brings Tapeless Production To The Baltics

PBK, the first Baltic Channel, has implemented a tapeless production system for news and programming from Thomson, a leading provider of solutions for the creation, management, and delivery and access of video, for the Communication, Media and Entertainment industries.
Based in Riga, Latvia, PBK broadcasts to all three Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) via satellite and cable systems, reaching an estimated seven million viewers.
At the heart of the new system are two Thomson Grass Valley K2 Media Servers, equipped with 3TB of RAID storage and using the AppCenter Pro management software. To edit the predominantly P2-acquired material, a number of Thomson Grass Valley EDIUS NX and EDIUS SP-SDI workstations are connected direct to the storage LAN and are used both for news production and for promos and trailers.
Janis Krievins, Project Manager of Thomson distributor Hannu ro, said: "PBK came to us for a new production workflow that would give them a significant increase in production speed and save on technical and human resources. By using the K2 media server and directly connected EDIUS editors we could deliver them a system that was very fast, secure, highly reliable and ready for HD in the future. And the ability to use exactly the same software on a field editor added even more flexibility."
Jeff Rosica, Senior Vice President of Thomson's Broadcast & Professional Solutions within the Systems division, said: "We have designed our equipment to work well together right out of the box, so there is no need for another layer of systems engineering and interconnection. EDIUS and K2 talk the same language."
For field editing a notebook computer loaded with EDIUS software is employed. The complete solution, developed for PBK by Hannu Pro, also includes desktop facilities for news editors to browse facilities, edit MXF metadata and perform rough cut editing to be finished on one of the EDIUS systems.
Further information is available at: www.thomson.net and www.thomsongrassvalley.com.
(KMcA/JM)