ERTU upgrades

 

Egyptian Radio and TV Union (ERTU) recently undertook a major project aimed at upgrading its Studio 5 and supplying news feeds to its eight newsroom studios to provide live news bulletins and live shows.

This ambitious multi-million dollar project included equipping a brand new studio and deploying new IT and TV technologies to enable ERTU’s migration to a file-based digital workflow.

Studio 5, which was used for ERTU’s news channel titled NileNews, ran for many years on traditional technology. The investment for Studio 5, therefore, included one Production Control Room (PCR), one Master Control Room (MCR) now, and one MCR for a second TV channel in the future.

The other part of this project involved sending news feeds to a newsroom. This includes eight PCRs to produce news and live shows for all of ERTU’s TV channels. This supports both IMX 50 and AVCI 50 formats.

The newsroom includes Quantel video servers and editing solutions, the ENPS NRCS system, Sony VTRs, and Miranda NVision router and multiviewer.

One common element in both the studio and the newsroom is the use of the ASTRA suite of tools from Prague-based automation solutions provider Aveco.

Studio 5 uses Aveco’s ASTRA Ingest to ingest video and other media files. ASTRA MCR and ASTRA News are used to playout Nile News, ERTU’s 24 hour news channel, from EVS video servers. Production is done on a number of Apple Final Cut Pro systems using placeholders from ASTRA News.

Likewise, the newsroom is ERTU’s main production facility and is based on Quantel production and playout servers.

A distributed ASTRA Orbiter system manages more than 80 Quantel channels in eight production control rooms to develop content for playout and distribution. ASTRA also provides a media asset management layer above Quantel for ingest, redundant playout, file import/ export, transcoding, archive control, and media exchange.

Tight integration of content and metadata between ASTRA and Quantel has been achieved through a native Quantel CORBA interface enabling metadata exchange between ASTRA and Quantel databases as well as the importing of clips from agencies such as Reuters, EBU, and APTN with full metadata preservation. ASTRA News receives the rundown from ENPS to automate the playout of content to multiple sites such as Nile International, Nile News, and Nile TV.  

 

What’s interesting in this project is the integration Aveco undertook with Quantel solutions, explains Roger Crooks, VP of sales and marketing at Aveco.

“Aveco developed direct access to Quantel’s database using their API. Their API was used to read, update, and create new assets. Quantel PowerPortals are used to import and export clips. What is key here is that ASTRA is a MAM layer above Quantel providing ERTU a central view of all its Quantel assets as well as all the assets of the two sites,” says Crooks.

ASTRA also provides ingest and playout control of the Quantel systems.

For file ingest, ASTRA loads all file metadata from various services via an xml file thus retaining all the descriptive metadata for the clip. Clips are first transcoded using Carbon Coder integrated with ASTRA to ERTU’s house formats.

Both sites are integrated with ASTRA components and are able to exchange media as well as control commands via a high-speed internet connection.

A key element in this project is also the ASTRA Content Management System (CMS), which moves clips between Quantel production systems and EVS playout video servers, automatically transcoding the Quantel AVCi 50 format into Apple Pro-Res format for playout on their EVS systems. Each site has full redundancy with mirrored ASTRA servers. Additional layers of redundancy are achieved via mirrored playout channels with automatic failover.  

In addition, the headquarters can import clips from all of the regional studios (as well as from agencies) under ASTRA CMS control and has the ability to share clips with other regions if needed.

ASTRA’s Content Management System (CMS) provides a high level MAM over both facilities. The architecture and workflow have been designed to eventually include a digital archive system which will also be controlled by ASTRA CMS, according to Crooks.

ERTU was looking for an automation system that is extremely reliable and highly customisable for customer specific needs, says Aveco’s Egyptian representative Systems Design. 

“ERTU wanted a supplier that could provide a highly reliable system with seamless failover operation,” explains Ahmed Gamal, managing director of Systems Design.

“After much research and talking with customer, we felt that Aveco was the obvious choice and a presentation to ERTU confirmed that. Throughout the project planning phase, many other vendors were under consideration.”

Aveco, according to Gamal, brought a lot of advantages.

For example, its solutions were highly customisable to suit the customer’s requirements. Secondly, it works on a more robust platform that does not crash often and is a lot more secure than operating systems. These were the key reasons ERTU chose Aveco over other players.

“Aveco worked closely with us and the customer to ensure the workflow design was optimal for ERTU’s needs and the installation was clean and complete,” adds Gamal.

Once the project was completed, training was provided to the end user on site and also at Aveco’s Prague office.

The Aveco ASTRA system architecture is extremely scalable without a redesign, explains Crooks. 

“Additional channels, functionality and new devices can easily be added. Expansion to more than 100 channels is not a problem,” he claims.

The supplier worked closely with system engineers, Systems Design staff, ERTU personnel as well as vendors such as Quantel, EVS and Miranda to complete this project.

“The Aveco installers needed experience in ASTRA, TV technologies and workflows and its software engineers had to learn Quantel’s CORBA API for the integration,” explains Crooks.

Development of the software took approximately one month including special integration work with Quantel. Another three months were spent on specification, installation, fine tuning, testing, and training.

“This new operation is an excellent model for going forward and expanding,” explains Gamal of Systems Design.

“Its new digital workflow provides an efficient and cost effective operation.”

As with most broadcast sites, ASTRA News has been designed for easy expansion of additional studios and/or broadcast channels.

ERTU also has plans to include a digital archive and new MCR channels in the near future.