Dutch Broadcast IT service provider ParkPost has integrated two VENICE Media Production Hubs from DVS into the OB vans of its sister company, DutchView. The ParkPost team now benefits from a lean IT infrastructure. The newly equipped OB vans were especially busy during the summer: VENICE was responsible for the ingest of the recorded material at the 2012 UEFA European Football Championship, Tour de France and the Olympic Games that were covered at the RTL “De Zomer Van 4” (Summer of 4) daily sports live show.
Park Post integrated the Media Production Hub VENICE from Rohde & Schwarz DVS GmbH into the OB vans of its sister company DutchView, with whom they work closely together on many projects, to ensure fast and reliable ingest and playout of the recorded material. Thanks to its compact 4U chassis, VENICE requires only little space and offers room for up to 8.4TB of fast and accessible internal storage, thus eliminating the need for additional storage at the OB vans.
VENICE expands on video server features such as HD-SDI ingest and studio playout to include intelligent file-based functions such as file ingest, metadata editing, transforming, media transfer and distribution. In doing so, VENICE serves as the central Media Production Hub in the narrow and hectic environment of the OB vans, making it easier for users to handle the ever-increasing number of media clips and jobs. Thanks to the openness of its platform, VENICE integrates seamlessly into the OB van’s constantly growing IT architecture.
In the production environment of these three major sport events, literally every second is important. With the VENICE systems, ParkPost was equipped with a high level of stability and efficiency combined with considerable time savings, allowing for the most important seconds to be displayed to the audience.
At DutchView’s OB van, VENICE captures incoming live signals via HD-SDI. All streams are then stored on VENICE. Since VENICE offers direct collaboration with Avid Media Composer thanks to the integrated Avid® Workflow Option, ParkPost’s editors can immediately access the entire material at all connected workstations. Thanks to the "edit while ingest" function in VENICE, video material can be viewed and edited even while it is being recorded, providing ParkPost with considerable time savings.
VENICE does not just offer live video ingest over HD-SDI; it also allows files to be ingested from P2 or XDCAM storage media. Edited sequences can be directly transferred to VENICE and then be placed in the production chain. The subsequent playout of the edited material requires no additional equipment. Especially in the hectic and fast-paced sports production, these features prove to be highly effective since the workflow can be designed more smoothly, and content can be produced even quicker. A combination of the DVS Media Production Hub with the Spycer content control software is especially helpful in fast media turnaround scenarios. VENICE’s codec variety (supporting, for example, Avid DNxHD, Apple ProRes 422 or Panasonic AVC-Ultra) provides the users at ParkPost with maximum flexibility in the organization of their workflows. The versatile setup allows them to organize their workflows without reconstructing them permanently and enables them to easily adapt to the changing needs of their customers.
