Promise and Vsquared TV Help Tour de France

The Tour de France is a cycling event broadcast on 121 different television channels in over 190 countries.

Broadcasting the race is a massive undertaking involving cameras capturing the action from motorbikes, helicopters and around the finish line. Since 1986, the Tour de France broadcasts for ITV in the UK have been produced by Vsquared TV. For the 2014 Tour de France, Vsquared TV built an advanced editing suites working on a sporting event this summer with the help of Promise Technology, Inc. and its Pegasus2 Thunderbolt 2 storage solution and SANLink2 Thunderbolt 2 to FC bridge.

Vsquared TV built one of the first broadcast implementations of Final Cut Pro X (FCPX) at this kind of scale and operating close to air. The impressive array of equipment deployed for their four main edit suites included AJA IO 4Ks, Softron Movie Recorder and new Mac Pros which were linked to a 70TB of FC SAN via the SANLink2. SANLink2 was critical to this project as without it Vsquared TV could not use the immense power of the new Mac Pros as there would be no way to link them to the SAN. Each edit suite had 12TB of local Thunderbolt 2 storage with a Pegasus2 drive configured in RAID-5 which was used to hold the working daily FCPX library, as well as an archive of previous days’ libraries.

A massive challenge for Vsquared TV was that the final highlights program went to air only two hours after the end of each day’s stage of the Tour de France. The end of the one hour program was usually still being edited as the beginning went to air – meaning speed was vitally important and their system delivered.

“We were able to export 15 minute parts from the timeline to the EVS ready for playout in under five minutes. When you are editing close to air this makes a very big difference since this gave us extra time to polish the final edits and still make air,” said Peter Wiggins, senior editor. “The Mac Pro paired with Pegasus2 and SANLink2 were hugely important to help us realize these massive gains in efficiency.“

“In the end I think we created one of the fastest and most powerful edit systems that can be put together,” said James Venner, producer, Vsquared TV. “My original aim was to achieve a move to FCPX with a minimum of disruption to our workflow. That in itself would have been a good first step, however, we far exceeded that and by the end of the race we were producing items that could not have been made in the same time using other systems.“

“It was really exciting to be involved with Vsquared TV as they broke new ground,” said John van den Elzen, MD, Promise EMEA. “With the quick turnarounds and tight deadlines Vsquared TV faced, they needed to have a lot of speed and confidence in their edit systems and we are thrilled that SANLink2 and Pegasus2 delivered the performance to be a key part of their project.“

Case study