EVS Bring Olympics to Life For Chinese TV

A company that specialises in the design of hardware and software for the production and playout of sport, news and TV programmes in both live and near-live environments, EVS Broadcast Equipment, is to reveal all on its Olympic connection.
As the sole provider of Olympics coverage to China during this year's Summer Games in Beijing, using EVS' XT[2], a Press conference on Friday 12th Sept at IBC 2008 will explain the company's Olympic task during the sporting spectacular.
Speaking in advance of the Amsterdam expo, Zhang Xing Deputy Director of China Central TV Sports Center praised the company's role and said: "The EVS system played an important multi-function role during the CCTV Olympics broadcast.
"It recorded the live feeds for replay; it allowed highlights creation during live, making the overall program more attractive to viewers.
"The EVS system features such as delay and turnaround applications are powerful and flexible for broadcast, a key to guarantee playout safety and improve the flexibility," he said.
EVS used CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, where seven HD XT[2] servers provided permanent recording in DNxHD of 32 live feeds from the Host Broadcaster.
All XT[2]s were linked together via the EVS XNet[2] media sharing network, along with two XF[2] digital archive stations. A total of 10 IPDirectors were installed at CCTV to manage all content available on the production network, providing indexing and cataloguing facilities, preview of any footage from any station of the 32 feeds, clipping, faster-than-real-time transfer to Avid for craft editing, and playout, including turnaround, delays, and playout of Avid-prepared content.
For field production, seven HD XT[2] servers with full MulticamLSM software functions allowed CCTV to prepare additional live production at selected venues.
This also allowed delays, turnaround, and highlight creation to be performed on site. Five field-based XF[2]s enabled CCTV to do digital archiving on the spot, as well.In total, the EVS system recorded 3,200 hours of media in loop recording mode, broken up into 27,000 total minutes of backup playout, 3,400 minutes of highlights and replays, and 4,400 minutes of ads, background, delay, turnaround, and insert footage to CCTV1, CCTV2, CCTV5, and CCTVHD.
(BMcC)