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Televisa: The Total Studio By Noah Kadner

It’s a little known fact that many countries send two teams to the Olympic Games, the athletes, whose exploits keep many of us awake well beyond our normal TV viewing times, and the television professionals, who stay up much longer than we do to enable our viewing.

For its coverage of the 2008 Beijing Summer Games, Mexico-based Televisa — the major distributor of Olympic content for Mexico and the largest media company in the Spanish-speaking world — sent a team of more than 200 people, including broadcast talent, engineers, editors, camera operators, and logistics personnel. To support their team, and to enable 12 hours of daily broadcasts, much of it live, Televisa shipped 30 tons of equipment, including more than 50 cameras, by sea and air.

“This is the largest Olympics that Televisa has been involved in,” says Manuel Ramírez Sánchez, General Sports Director for Televisa. “We've been preparing for the last two years. We started the day after we got back from the the World Cup in Germany."

And because television teams, unlike athletes, are largely responsible for building their own venues, Televisa created in Beijing’s International Broadcast Center its own end-to-end television station, including two live studios, using Apple’s Final Cut Studio and Xsan technology.

Breaking the Tape In Beijing, for the first time, Televisa will use a Mac-based, 100 percent digital, tapeless workflow to deliver both high definition and standard definition Olympics content simultaneously. “Our people have been used to working with linear tapes in the past,” says Sánchez. “The challenge is to take advantage of the new technology and have people actually see a quality difference on the other end.”

Final Cut Studio’s open standards-based capabilities greatly facilitated its integration with the third party hardware and software Televisa chose to incorporate with its system.

“Final Cut Studio has surprised us with its versatility,” says Elías Rodriguez, Televisa’s Director General of Operations. “It’s adapted very well to the new workflow we put together, and it’s also a very open system. At the Athens Games in 2004, 90 percent of our operation was analog with Beta SP tape decks, and now that’s completely reversed. We worked closely with our Apple integrator, Simplemente, to design an expanded workflow built around Final Cut Studio and Xsan. We also use Panasonic DVCPRO HD

Standardized Workflow Televisa needed a workflow that would allow them to deliver SD and HD content at the same time and compile complete digital archives of all of their programming. “Workflow is the name of the game for us,” says Max Arteaga, Televisa’s Vice President of Operations. “And the most important goal is creating a standardized workflow for all of our productions. With Apple and Final Cut Studio the entire process is transparent to the producer, all the work happens in HD. At the end of post-production we can do all of our down-conversions to standard definition and analog as needed, all within the same system.”

To support that workflow in the Beijing studio, Televisa devised an integrated Apple Xsan network with 30 Mac Pros running Final Cut Studio and 50 Xserves connected via Fibre Channel using a QLogic 9200 Director-class switch, along with another 12 iMac editing stations connected over standard Ethernet. To hold all of the generated footage, Televisa’s network includes 200 terabytes of storage using Promise Technology Raid arrays. The solution is designed to handle 22 simultaneous ingest channels of live footage and support the almost 50 Final Cut Pro editing workstations, mixed between offline-quality proxy editing and online editing. The daily workload is up to 12 hours from each of the 22 channels of incoming footage.

Taking It All In Each day the system will process up to 250 hours of footage multiplied by the 20 days of Olympics coverage. In addition to the 22 channels of incoming pool footage, Televisa also has camera crews using Panasonic P2 cameras to create special reports and human interest stories with all post-production completed within Final Cut Studio.

 

Gallery

Workflow Diagram

 

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Company Brief

Televisa

Challenge:

Solution:

Major distributor of Olympic content for Mexico and the largest media company in the Spanish-speaking world. Learn More

Build a fully automated, end-to-end live sports production studio onsite in Beijing.

Working with Simplemente, Televisa devised an open standards-based, seamless, end-to-end tapeless workflow around an integrated Xsan infrastructure of Mac Pros and iMacs running Final Cut Studio 2 to edit footage, create graphics, and produce and package content from 22 simultaneous ingest stations. The entire system is controlled by Siennaʼs OriginOne gateway server, which manages the updating of clips from ingest through editorial to playout.

Simplemente

Useful Links

Televisa

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P2 solid-state cameras, and our engineers evaluated many different solutions to determine that Final Cut Pro would be the best match. We’ve used a completely tapeless workflow with Apple in Mexico before, but never on location and never on this scale.”

 

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The Suite Solutions In Action Tutorials Resources Tech Specs

Televisa: The Total Studio Two Mac Pros with Gallery Sienna Ingest Control manage 22 Xserve ingest servers running Sienna PictureReady. The entire system is administered by a Sienna OriginOne gateway server, which automates the updating of clips from ingest through editorial to playout. Sienna StoryCut allows editors to browse content and drag and drop directly into Final Cut Pro while the content is still being recorded.

“The Televisa project is one of the larger systems we’ve been a part of, but it has certainly been the smoothest ride so far,” says Mark Gilbert, Gallery’s Director of Product Development. “It's a very large system with a huge storage load, so storage is the part that needs to be most carefully designed and setup.”

Televisa also uses EVS ingest servers to receive footage directly from the Beijing Olympic Broadcasting company (BOB), the official Chinese network for the Games. Up to 30 minutes of footage can be downloaded each day from the BOB EVS systems. Final Cut Server watches the download folder, automatically adds chosen clips to the Xsan volume, and creates browsable proxies. Editors receive email notifications when new EVS clips are available. Clips can be dragged into their Final Cut Pro projects, directly into the Sienna VirtualVTR or BUG.tv playout servers.

In addition to footage, the EVS servers also supply XML metadata that allows the editors to quickly search and catalog material, with markers automatically created in Final Cut Pro. The metadata comes directly from BOB as a catalog of every event, including scores, fouls, or times. EVS is tightly integrated with Final Cut Pro and capable of reading and writing QuickTime files in several important formats for Televisa, including ProRes and IMX (50 Mbit). Sienna and EVS are also cross-compatible with Sienna, allowing it to control and play out directly to EVS servers.

Go to Air The system feeds the two live broadcast studios with playout directly to air from a combination of Sienna VirtualVTR and BUG.tv CLASS-1 playout solutions. Twelve Apple and four EVS playout servers, split between the two studios, transmit the actual broadcast content. Sienna’s AutomationX playlist software, an integrated newsroom automation system based on QuickTime and tightly integrated with Final Cut Studio, controls four VirtualVTR machines. CLASS-1, a software-based playout server running on Mac OS X, is capable of managing complex multi-channel operations from a single window. CLASS-1 can also play Final Cut Pro files directly without a

“We took both the Sienna and BUG.tv playout systemsto Beijing to see to which adapts to our workflow and operators best,” notes Rodriguez. “We also back up all of our playouts using the EVS servers. We’ll be pushing out everything simultaneously in both HD and SD. We used a similar workflow on a much smaller scale recently at the World Cup in Germany and it worked out quite well.”

Setting Records Completed content is archived after airing using four Sun StorageTek LTO-4 tape drives and 227 cartridge slots, all managed by XenData. XenData is a stub file system, which means that a small portion of each file stays on the hard drive, while the majority of the file gets backed up onto LTO-4 tape, enabling expedited browsing and restoration.

The entire archive system appears as a single mounted drive to all of the machines using the backup system, including Final Cut Server, Sienna, and EVS. “The archive is a new and critical aspect of the system,” says Rodriguez. “We needed it to not only integrate with Final Cut Studio and the rest of our gear but to also function completely transparently to the operators.”

Sienna MediaServices controls the archiving of assets from the Sienna database, and it can partially restore assets already on tape as needed. “Content management is really a key aspect of what we do,” says Arteaga. “Previously we worked primarily on tape and now it’s all digital files. This is necessary for us because we also export a lot of our regular programming to customers in the US, where by law all content must switch over to digital after February 2009.”

Bringing It Home Televisa’s use of their integrated production system won’t end with the Games in Beijing. All of the equipment and experience will be brought back to Mexico and folded into their regular sports coverage operations. “The Olympics are a part of our overall strategy of total integration both internally and externally,” says Arteaga. “This is the first time we are going to use a 100 percent digital and 100 percent tapeless workflow to cover the Olympics, but in the end Beijing is just one event. We’re going to integrate the Beijing Apple Team and equipment back into our daily broadcasting system in Mexico. That was our most important decision.”

 

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Toolkit

Mac Pro iMac Final Cut Studio Final Cut Server Xsan, with over 200TB storage Xserve FileMaker Pro Promise Technology QLogic JLCooper Hi Tech Systems AJA Kona 3 and LHe EVS Gallery SIENNA BUG.tv CLASS-1 VMware Fusion XenData Panasonic P2 Sun StorageTek LTO-4

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lengthy conversion process, which greatly simplifies the broadcast workflow.

Find assets fast. Automate workflows.

Explore industry-leading technologies.

See production visionaries at work.

Or call 1-800-MY-APPLE Visit an Find your Have Apple

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