VTV / Molinare:
Pushing Broadcasting to the Limit
Even by the standards of the world’s most prestigious cycling event, the 2005 Tour de France was momentous. Cycling enthusiasts from all over the world tuned in to watch the indefatigable Lance Armstrong make history with an unprecedented seventh consecutive Tour win.
In the UK, ITV covered the three-week event with a daily hour-long highlights programme on ITV2 plus live coverage on Saturday and Sunday, and a weekly highlights programme every Monday on ITV1.
“Visitors who came to look at our system simply couldn’t believe I could play a clip on the timeline to within five seconds of it still recording — I had to show them to prove it!”
Mounting a broadcast operation on such a large scale is a phenomenal task. Turnaround needs to be lightning-fast and with a high profile event like the Tour, there’s simply no margin for error. A London-based ‘dream team’ was assembled to take on the job — and the ‘dream workflow’ they employed was based around Apple technology.
James Venner, producer/director of production company VTV, has been covering the Tour since 1986. Venner joined forces with freelance editor Peter Wiggins, who has been editing sport for over 15 years and the Tour for nine years. The other key members of the ‘dream team’ were Soho-based broadcast facility, Molinare, and Apple Solution Experts, Root6, who supplied the equipment and helped install the Xsan at Molinare.
Venner and Wiggins designed the system back in February after successfully using Final Cut Pro on the Tour de Langkawi in Malaysia. Wiggins says: “What we designed back then is exactly the system that was installed here in Molinare”. Venner adds: “But without the expertise of the team at Apple, the Tour de France project would never have got off the ground. Their support and advice were invaluable”.
Venner says: “Right from the start, our priority was accessing footage instantly. To achieve this, we used Gallery’s PictureReady! software, which runs exclusively on Mac OS X”. PictureReady! is an ingest and record program that allows users to access and work with QuickTime files before they have actually stopped recording.
As Venner explains: “PictureReady! sort of ‘deceives’ Final Cut Pro into thinking it is working with a closed QuickTime file. It allowed us to cut out the traditional digitising process and access material before digitising was complete. We ran three copies of the application on three Power Mac G5s, all of which could be in record at once”.
The ability to start editing footage even before recording was complete was crucial to the decision to use a non-linear, Mac-based set-up for ITV’s coverage of the 2005 Tour de France — it’s also what made the coverage so exceptional.
For the duration of the Tour, Venner and Wiggins worked out of Molinare’s broadcast facility in Soho, from where they were able to access the live satellite feeds, edit the footage and play-out the coverage directly to ITV every evening. Venner adds: “Because PictureReady! works with QuickTime files, we clearly needed a QuickTime-native system. As a result, Molinare invested £150,000 in a purpose-built Apple solution”.
According to Molinare’s managing director, Mark Foligno, Apple’s open architecture allowed Molinare and VTV to run Final Cut Pro in a way that improved the workflow for undertaking the Tour De France daily highlights.
To date, Molinare’s non-linear solution had been firmly Avid-based but, as Venner points out, “We simply couldn’t achieve what we wanted with Molinare’s existing kit”. So Molinare carried out an in-depth technical review of the available systems on the market. Foligno explains: “We decided that the key benefit Apple had over its competitors was its products’ ability to work in tandem with third-party software like PictureReady!, enabling a streamlined workflow to create the daily highlights show from the live feeds coming into the building. This system design worked magnificently and was a credit to the design team, Molinare staff and Apple’s technology”.
