Manchester, UK - July 2, 2012 - Blackmagic Design today announced that leading news organization Agence France Presse (AFP) broadcast their live coverage of the 65th Cannes Film Festival award ceremony using Blackmagic Design’s ATEM 2 M/E Production Switcher, Smart Videohub and UltraStudio 3D.
At the festival, television reporting teams from AFP captured the first reactions of winners and discussed the films that had been entered into the 2012 competition. Customers of AFP in Europe and the Middle East were fed a live HD broadcast feed from the AFP OB van via satellite, while fiber link was used to transmit the broadcast to those in Asia.
With the support of France based Atreid, AFP built its SNG van around Blackmagic Design’s Smart Videohub, which routed all incoming SD and HD signals. The upstream video signals to the van were converted from HD-SDI to fiber optic using Blackmagic Mini Converters, before content was fed into the ATEM 2 M/E Production Switcher.
“The feature rich broadcast switcher allows for live direction of complex shows, making Blackmagic’s ATEM 2 M/E the perfect switcher for broadcasting live news, television shows and corporate programs with motion graphics thanks to powerful DVE and keyers built in,” said Yves Tassel of Agence France Presse.
Tassel adds: “Blackmagic Design’s new audio mixer feature on the ATEM 2 M/E arrived just in time for Cannes. Before the audio mixer feature came out, we had to extract audio from the HD-SDI streams in order for us to mix sources with an analog mixer, then route the audio mix into the analogue XLR inputs. With the audio mixer, play out sources were setup and manual mix was configured on the voice over from the journalist.”
Additionally, Blackmagic’s UltraStudio 3D Thunderbolt based capture and playback device, connected to a MacBook Pro and Final Cut Pro 7, was used by AFP to allow news teams to edit reports via the SNG van on location to broadcast time sensitive content as it happened.
“The addition of the audio mixer to the ATEM 2 M/E makes this a very powerful piece of kit given that space is always something of a premium. The small form factor, coupled with its intuitive design and broadcast quality features make this a very powerful and cost effective piece of technology,” concluded Tassel.
