ABS-CBN, the largest integrated media and entertainment company in the Philippine Islands, has chosen EVS technology to migrate to a tapeless production workflow in their studios and Outside Broadcast vans. The EVS solution was also chosen because of its interoperability with non-linear post production systems, especially its integration with Avid.
"ABS-CBN is digitalizing all areas of production, and we needed a solution that could integrate easily with other vendors," said Raul Bulaong, ABS-CBN Head of Technical Operations Division. "EVS' XT[2] server will give us flexibility to work with Avid and other third-party providers, in our studios and our OB Vans. In addition, we are currently producing content in both Standard and High Definition formats, and we were looking for a system that would support both and provide the highest level of quality, no matter what format we're working in."
In total, ABS-CBN will install 14 XT[2] servers throughout their company for ingest of media, and IPDirector in their studios for control of these servers and for logging and browsing. Media transfer to Avid ISIS for post production will be done with EVS' XFile acting as a gateway. All media will be compressed in IMX for SD and DNxHD for HD, which makes all EVS equipment natively compatible with ABS-CBN's Avid post production system.
For studio production, three 4-channel XT[2] servers controlled by IPDirector will be installed in ABS-CBN studios for ingest, content indexing, review, clipping, and transfer to temporary archive or to Avid ISIS for post production. Using IPDirector allows users to review multiple camera angles directly, making it easy to select the best one. Also, because this solution ingests media digitally, editors will be able to edit media immediately upon ingest, even while recording is still in process, rather than waiting for tapes to be digitalized.
Outside the studio, ten OB Boxes, each consisting of an XT[2] Spotbox and an XFile will used in the field for multicamera capture on removable media. Six OB Boxes are SD only, while four are HD/SD switchable. Finally, one 6-channel HD/SD XT[2] with LSM and XFile will installed in the OB Van used for recording sports events. The XFile removable media drives provide a cost-effective method of getting material from the OB Vans into the studios for post production, as well.
"This migration to EVS' proposed tapeless solution will definitely improve ABS-CBN's productions in several ways," said Olivier Heurteaux, Sales Manager for EVS Asia-Pacific. "Even at the most basic level, this tapeless workflow will save them time and improve their picture quality. Beyond that, because the XT[2] natively supports the DNxHD codec, their post production process will be simplified exponentially. Also, they can rest assured that the system they put in place now will be compatible with almost any other elements they want to introduce to the workflow later on."
