Qvest Media supplied the broadcasters with the AV, IT and media technology from its rental pool

Qvest Media supplemented the technical resources for German public broadcasters ARD and ZDF for transmissions from the Winter Games in South Korea. As previously with similar major international sporting events, Qvest Media has supplied systems components for a temporary period based on the latest AV, IT and media technology that enable a seamless production workflow for both broadcasters between Pyeongchang in South Korea and Leipzig in Germany.

The Winter Games in Pyeongchang began for the global public on 9 February 2018. By this date, the technical departments of ARD, ZDF and Qvest Media had already worked together to create the technological base for live coverage of the Winter Games. Qvest Media supplied the broadcasters with the AV, IT and media technology from its rental pool in order to set up a networked, live production platform in the International Broadcast Center (IBC) in Pyeongchang and in the National Broadcast Center (NBC) in Leipzig.

“A special challenge with these Winter Games was the extremely short planning and lead time,” explains Henning Miehe, Key Account Manager Rental Solutions & Services at Qvest Media. “Following the award of the project, we had less than four weeks in which to agree with the teams from ARD and ZDF on the technical details, plan deployment and make the logistical arrangements for the delivery of the system components.”

ARD and ZDF used the equipment supplied by Qvest Media to set up a live production platform specially designed for the requirements of live sports production and collaborative work. In essence, Qvest Media contributed completing components for a live ingest and playout installation, a post-production environment with non-linear craft editing workplaces for audio and video processing, a central storage system as well as multiviewer systems for production control and transcoder engines for format conversion. Furthermore, ARD and ZDF were able to access a turnkey system from Qvest Media for real-time graphics.

EVS installation, Avid environment

Central ingest, highlight editing and playout were performed with an EVS installation comprising EVS IP Director, XT Access Ultra High Performance systems as well as 25 EVS XT production servers with Multicam Software. In order to increase the production performance of the installation, Qvest Media itself invested in four new XT4K-generation EVS systems, extending its pool of live production servers of this vendor.

In the run-up to the Winter Games, Qvest Media supplied ZDF with a comprehensive Avid Interplay system for permanent integration with the Mainz-based broadcaster’s mobile production unit (MPU). File ingest into the Avid environment is effected via XT Access from the EVS network. This enables the production teams to import and provide video material using Avid Interplay. The material can be accessed and edited from the eight non-linear editing workplaces equipped with Media Composer workstations, before being transferred to the EVS playout server via Interplay Transfer Engines. In addition, Qvest Media temporarily extended the MPU to include AVID NEXIS E4 engines with total storage of 360 TB.