Back to Reality with Two Four
image copyright ITV
This Sunday at 9pm on ITV2 will see the first episode of Ibiza Weekender, which was our first tapeless record, logging and review system for a reality TV production. We hit Broadcast magazine earlier this week, which means we could finally tell you about this project that we’ve been working on since August last year! Our friends at Two Four decided to move the hugely successful Magaluf Weekender to Ibiza for this new series. Working closely with Two Four’s head of facilities Rick Horne, we devised a way of using tried and tested EVS XT3 recorders in a main and backup configuration along with IP Directors, multiple Avid ingest machines and 75TB storage system with an IP Clip Logger and IP Browse set-up to use back in the UK during the edit. This enabled us to continuously record 24 remote cameras into a number of cut streams for up to 24 hours a day for nearly a month. As always reliability and safety of material was of the highest priority but by using EVS’s highly reliable XT3 servers this gave us confidence and by streaming live through a number of secondary servers which also created proxy files for logging back in the UK, it then went straight onto our raided storage, a secondary independent storage system and then archiving onto data tape using numerous machines. The Collectv's Operations Director, Chris Sarson talks us through some of the considerations;
“We used a system that we have years of experience in as a basis for this workflow developed for Two Four, however we had to be prepared to record for 24 hours every day, which should we have experienced an issue would have given us no time to stop and resolve it. Not forgetting we were also on a small Spanish island not known for its spares for broadcast equipment! Therefore we had to ensure that we used hardware that had enough redundancy within itself but also that all of our record and media management team, (Daniel Searle, Sam Linforth and Simone Herbert) completed comprehensive manual checks to ensure there could be no issues with the media either at the point of record, or in the months of editing back in the UK. They all did a fantastic job, between them they checked around 4000 individual video and audio clips running around the clock.”
Check out the link below for our story in Broadcast Now.