Belgian company Outside Broadcast used its years of experience with sports production to capture the myriad performances at the 41st Montreux Jazz Festival for television.
The Montreux Jazz Festival is a major event for Outside Broadcast and presented the ideal challenge for testing an all digital OB production workflow. During 16 days of concerts, two OB-Trucks record six hours of shows in HD per day.
"From every show, we record a program, a backup program and two ISO cameras" said Ronald Meyvisch, technical and operations manager for the company "This takes 24 hours of HD tape per day. Each concert is edited the day after the shoot, and the HD master is copied to various SD and HD formats for archiving. Two editors, one engineer for duplication, and 13 HD VTRs were needed to do this job last year."
"Thanks to our new full EVS setup based on XT2 servers, we're able to drastically reduce the number of VTRs and HD tapes. We now record just one backup tape per stage. All concerts are archived on EVS XFile2 disks drives and can be transferred directly to Final Cut Pro, Avid or other NLEs in case re-editing is needed. Compared to tapes, the physical space for storage is smaller and the cost per minute is lower."
Final production is faster, too, as EVS CleanEdit allows the editing of concerts to start while the show is going on.
