Estonian Public Broadcaster ERR Go Live With VSM for UEFA European Championship

posted:

03/11/2014

Estonia’s public broadcaster ERR went live with a new Virtual Studio Manager (VSM) system in their OB IRIS truck covering the UEFA qualifying match between Estonia and England. As Host Broadcaster almost all cameras went through ERR for this high profile sporting event. Using VSM they made full use of their existing infrastructure facilitating for their current workflows and offering new flexibility.

The installation used a combination of LSB’s LCD button panels (LBP Series) alongside existing Grass Valley CP panels. This meant ERR had greater flexibility with the LBP panels while saving costs keeping their existing panels interfacing to VSM. ERR took full advantage of VSM’s available platforms using redundant HP DL320 servers built in a load balancing cluster to ensure reliability while keeping both weight and size to a minimum.

The connected devices consisted of a range of manufactures including Evertz, Grass Valley, Lawo and Avitech. The core functionality required to control these devices was realised by delivering:
• Evertz VIP 12 Split Multiviewers system Tally / UMD
• Avitech Rainier Cascaded Multiviewer system Tally / UMD
• GV Kayak 250 Video Mixer Tally and Aux bus routing and Label Transfer
• GV HD SDI Trinix 256 x 256 Video Router control
• Lawo MC²56 Audio Mixer / Router with routing and parameter control
• GV LDK connect gateway for Tally eliminating the need for GPIO boxes and cabling.

Senior engineer in charge Toomas Õigus described the system as “so big with so many possibilities…. we are extremely happy”. VSM is a complete user configurable system meaning engineers can manage and prepare configurations both on and off line for productions. Using out of the box logic engineers can load and save production set ups at a push of a button reducing both time and efforts onsite.