Télévision Suisse Romande (TSR), the national French-language TV broadcaster in Switzerland, has completed its transition to a tapeless, MXF/AAF-centered production and post-production workflow using Merging Technologies equipment, including Pyramix digital audio workstations, VCube nonlinear video playback units and Luxor media servers.
The broadcaster, part of the Swiss French-language broadcasting division of Radio Télévision Suisse (RTS), began planning a move to a tapeless, MXF-based production workflow back in 2004. Two years later, in 2006, the new audio post-production department, to whom Merging supplied equipment consisting of 10 Pyramix DAWs, 10 VCube video player/recorders and two Luxor servers, was operating reliably and efficiently on an OMF-based workflow.
This year, RTS has taken the next step up in terms of interoperability and switched the whole workflow to MXF and AAF. All of the Pyramix and VCube systems at RTS have been updated to the latest 6.2 and 2.2 versions, and the same level of productivity has been seamlessly achieved.
Over the past three years, a strong collaboration evolved between TSR and Merging to bring VCube to the level of a reference tool in the broadcaster’s workflow. VCube is now used as a MXF player and as a wrapping tool, combining mixed audio and video in a MXF container at four times the real-time speed or more.
The next step for RTS is the adaptation of the workflow for HD broadcast, which should happen next year. "The Merging infrastructure now in place at TSR is already more than capable of HD operation, so this will be a reasonably straightforward transition,” said Dominique Brulhart, Merging's head of software engineering. “Initial tests and validation have shown perfect compatibility between the various HD-capable elements at TSR and Merging equipment on a workflow based around AAF, MXF and MPEG-2 HD long-GOP formats.”
