France Télévisions is producing daily highlights coverage of the 2015 Tour de France cycling race. The post-production team’s job involves managing the huge volume of race footage from many sources and turning it into exciting, informative highlights packages ready to air under the event's tight deadlines.
   

The 2015 Tour de France started with the Grand Départ in Utrecht, Netherlands on 4 July and finishes with the victory parade on 26 July on the Champs-Elysées, Paris. Gilles Parcq, Technical Manager, France Télévisions, said, “For the Tour de France, a major sporting event on our production calendar, it is crucial that we get our coverage right. We needed robust post-production equipment and a workflow that could be set up easily each day, and that would enable us to manage a significant amount of content to help our editors find and work with the right clips. Meeting our requirements depends on a combination of creativity and reliability.”

France Télévisions’ OB vehicle, which is travelling with the Tour, houses an Avid workflow. Each media file component and its relationship to each project can be tracked, linking all resolution and format versions and maintaining version control. The editors can find, browse and bring media in for packages from local or remote sites using filtering based on the metadata attributes.

Due to the EVS XT/XS series servers’ native support of several SD/HD codecs, any type of incoming media can be transferred or streamed to OB workflow without any separate encoding or decoding process. The media exchange is fast and maintains the recording’s original quality.

The EVS servers and Avid craft editing applications are linked by sending media through EVS XTAccessor XFile. XTAccess is EVS’ transcoding and rewrapping software, a media processing engine facilitating media interchange between the EVS servers and third-party graphics, post, MAM and various other systems.

XTAccess handles a series of automatic media-conforming operations such as on the fly transcoding, media rewrapping and playlist rendering. XFile finds and restores archived content - transcoding it if necessary - and automatically backs it up to disk as required throughout production.

Also, using EVS IPDirector and bi-directional streaming modules, content recorded on EVS servers can be immediatley streamed to any station through the network while recording is still in progress. In the reverse process, packages edited and prepared in Avid post-production suites may be sent to EVS XT3 or XS servers for immediate playout, even while the media is still being transferred.