In Broadcast - May 2018 - 64

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 8 - Issue 5 | May 2018

InForm

EVS HQ Training Centre Packs
a Punch with IHSE KVM
By Robert Viola, Vice President of
Technical Operations, EVS Americas...
The Customer
EVS is globally recognised as
the technology leader for video
production, with wide-ranging HD
to UHD/4K solutions for live sports,
entertainment, and news content.
You'll find EVS' premium media
technologies in operations throughout
the world helping broadcasters, rights
owners, and producers optimise live
assets, engage audiences, and increase
revenue streams by monetising
content across multiple platforms.
Customer research and education are
critical to what we do. That's why we
have training facilities in 12 locations
around the world. It's a way for us not
only to introduce new products and
offer in-depth, hands-on training in
how to make the most of them, but to
understand what our customers need
and how they use our products.
Recently EVS moved its Fairfield,
New Jersey, headquarters to a new
building, and in the process, we built
a new and much more flexible training
centre with plenty of upgrades,
including the addition of a new IHSE
KVM.
The Challenge
The crux of the new training centre
is the main instruction room with 10
seats - nine for the trainees and one
for the trainer. There are two monitors
per trainee plus two for the trainer, for
a total of 20, in addition to 2x 70-inch
monitors on the wall for all to see.
Besides using KVM for all seats in
the training room, KVM also controls
stations in our VIP room, a more
comfortable, lounge-like room used
for dedicated behind-the-curtains
demos and proofs of concept with VIP
clients. Two of the
training room seats
also feed our main
conference room,
making it possible
for
meeting
participants to call
up information from
the training room during a meeting, if
necessary. There are two more seats in

the reception area to greet customers
with our newest product, X-One.
A touch-screen-enabled product,
allowing customers to walk up to touch
it, play with it, and see the product
features before getting into their indepth training.
All screens are touch-screen-enabled,
and every seat - monitors, keyboard,
mouse, and touch screens - is
accessible by KVM.
Our KVM use case is different than in
a traditional broadcast environment,
where operators call up a product
and use it to send something from
point A to point B. Because we're
training, we must be able to present
and push the trainers' screens to
the operators and vice versa. We
also need to preconfigure and save
the training sessions so they can
be called up at will. And given our
multi-room setup, we needed a quick,
robust KVM switching capability to
pass seat control from room to room
at a significant distance within the
building.
The Requirements
To make it all happen, we
equipped the new training
centre with KVM gear from
IHSE. We've been using
IHSE equipment inside our
"EVS Live on Tour" demo van since
April 2016 to give customers on-site
demonstrations of the latest EVS liveproduction solutions. IHSE also came
highly recommended by many of our
customers, including engineers and

EVS & IHSE
equipment

EVS Training Room

operators from Game Creek Video,
which is what prompted us to turn to
IHSE in the first place.
We have an 80-port Draco tera
compact switch wired with Cat 5E
cable, along with associated CON
and CPU units that go on either end
of the peripheral and connect to all
the devices in our rack room. All
the equipment resides in the main
equipment room, while the extensions
are in the training room. This setup
keeps the training room quiet because
all that's running in the room are the
connection units from IHSE.

Essentially, trainers and trainees can
simulcast their local seats from place
to place. Also, unlike in the old facility,
where we needed a keyboard and
mouse for every PC, IHSE KVM enables
screen spanning from one screen to
the next. As long as the screens are
next to each other, one keyboard and
mouse can span multiple screens and
control multiple PCs. Simply drag the
mouse where you want it and start
using the keyboard, and it ties right
into the correct PC. Equipment used
for the New Jersey EVS Training Center
2. We can now prebuild multiple
classes using IHSE's Draco tera
tool software, which gives us
the flexibility to go from one
training session to another
with the push of a button. We
use tera tool to build screen
layouts and lessons for our
many products, and then we
IHSE 80 Port KVM System with Cat-X connections simply take a few minutes to
How It Was Designed
load the appropriate lesson before
The IHSE KVM equipment gives us the class starts. This is a major
several advantages over our old improvement over the old way, which
training facility. Two of the biggest:
required a support engineer and a
1. Trainers can now push their screens day's worth of time to reconfigure the
to the trainees, so trainees can see training lab for each new class.
the lessons up close. Then,
with a keyboard stroke, Technology Rollout
trainees can quickly switch With IHSE KVM gear in place, we have
back to their local machines the flexibility, configurability, and roto practice the functions bust switching necessary to make our
in the lesson. By the same new training centre shine.
token, trainees can push Thanks to our history of success with
their own screens to the IHSE, and especially the success we've
large monitors in the front had with the our US headquarters
of the room, which come training centre since it opened in June
in handy when a trainee of 2017, we're looking to add IHSE KVM
does something noteworthy that gear as we expand our regional trainwould benefit the rest of the class. ing centres. Next up: Los Angeles.

http://www.inbroadcast.com http://www.evs.com http://www.evs.com http://www.ihse.com http://www.ihse.com

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