In Broadcast - November 2014 - 28

I N T E R N A T I O N A L

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 37 - NOVEMBER 2014

N E W S

InMEDIA

PROMISE and Vsquared TV Create
Editing Suite For The Tour de France
T

28

he Tour de France is the most
prestigious cycling event and
one of the most famous sporting
events in the world. The top cyclists
from around the world compete
in a gruelling three week 3,500
km journey each July that takes
competitors through the mountain
chains of the Pyrenees and the Alps
and on to the ﬁnish on the ChampsÉlysées in Paris.
The Tour de France is broadcast
worldwide on 121 different television
channels in over 190 countries with
huge audiences watching each
stage, including a record 44 million
viewers who took in one of the ﬁnal
stages in the 2009 race.
It takes a massive effort to
broadcast all of the excitement to
the millions of fans watching around
the globe. During each stage, the
drama is captured by ﬁve wireless
cameras and two journalists on
motorbikes while aerial images from
two helicopters capture the beautiful
French scenery. Twenty podium
cameras are positioned around
the ﬁnish line while an additional
35 vehicles support the broadcast.
Broadcasting a major sporting
event every day for three straight
weeks is a massive undertaking
that requires an incredible amount
of planning and the latest in
broadcasting technology.

Switch To FCP X
In 2005, Vsquared TV was amongst
the ﬁrst to use Apple's Final Cut Pro
software connected to a SAN in
live and near live situations. When
Vsquared was considering a switch
to Final Cut Pro X (FCP X) for the

One of Vsquared TV's four edit suites

2014 Tour de France there were a
number of challenges to be solved.
It was determined that the software
would best be run on Apple's
new Mac Pro computers which
required a Thunderbolt bridge in
order to connect to a high-speed
Fibre Channel SAN.
This was the ﬁrst time Vsquared
TV would be using a Thunderbolt
bridge and Apple advised them
to approach PROMISE for the
SANLink2, a compact device
that allows a Thunderbolt 2 host
computer to directly connect to a
Fibre Channel SAN. SANLink2 was
critical to this project as without it
Vsquared TV could not use the
immense power of the new Mac
Pros as there would be no way to
link them to the SAN.
Vsquared also decided that
some fast locally attached storage
would be needed and PROMISE
had the ideal solution for this as
well - Pegasus2, the industry's
leading hardware RAID 5/6 storage
solution with Thunderbolt 2 that
comes in four, six and eight bay
models in addition to the compact
and portable M4.
"We had previously used PROMISE
Thunderbolt storage for archive
purposes, so we were familiar with
the Pegasus2 R6," said James
Venner, Producer, Vsquared TV. "We
planned to install a small amount of
local storage on each edit station
and the new Pegasus2 M4 was
the perfect solution as its small
form factor and high performance
perfectly met our requirements, so
ultimately we ended up combining
several R6 and M4 drives."

The edit suites were linked to a 70TB SAN where all of the media was stored

Advanced Editing Suites
Vsquared TV had four edit suites
with high-end Mac Pros linked
to a 70TB SAN where all of the
media was stored. Softron Movie
Recorder was running on two Mac
Pros which gave Vsquared TV up
to eight channels of HD recording.
Each edit suite had access to a daily
growing ﬁle of the incoming feed
from France and was connected
to the SAN via a dual 4GB ﬁbre link
using the SANLink2. Each edit suite
had 12TB of local Thunderbolt 2
storage with a Pegasus2 R6 drive
conﬁgured in RAID 5 which was
used to hold the working daily
FCPX library, as well as an archive
of previous days' libraries.
The project involved handling
large video ﬁles of around 500GB
per day for 21 consecutive days. A
massive challenge for Vsquared TV
was that the ﬁnal programme went

to air only two hours after the end
of each day's stage of the Tour de
France. In fact, the end of the one
hour programme was usually still
being edited as the beginning went
to air. Editing quickly and efﬁciently
was an absolute necessity.

Exceeding Expectations
This was one of the ﬁrst broadcast
implementations of FCPX and
certainly the ﬁrst at this kind of
scale and operating close to air.
"We were replacing a FCP 7 based
system that had served us well for
nine years but was showing its
age," said Venner. "The PROMISE
SANLink2 and Pegasus2 were an
essential part of building a working
implementation."
With the new Mac Pro and
Pegasus2, Vsquared TV saw
increased speed in editing as
the new Mac Pro made waits for
rendering a thing of the past. "We
were able to export 15 minute parts
from the timeline to the EVS ready
for playout in under ﬁve minutes.
When you are editing close to air this
makes a very big difference since
this gave us extra time to polish
the ﬁnal edits and still make air,"
said Peter Wiggins, Senior Editor.
"The Mac Pro paired with Pegasus2
and SANLink2 have been hugely
important to help us realise these
massive gains in efficiency."
"In the end I think we created one
of the fastest and most powerful edit
systems that can be put together,"
said Venner. "My original aim was
to achieve a move to FCPX with
a minimum of disruption to our
workﬂow. That in itself would have
been a good ﬁrst step, however, we
far exceeded that and by the end of
the race we were producing items
that could not have been made in
the same time using FCP 7."

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