EVS streamlines production at 2014 World Rally Championship

Several EVS solutions allow FilmWorks, the production company commissioned by the FIA ​​to cover the World Rally Championship, to immediately have the material available to all interested parties and produce different highlights.

The World Rally Championship (FIA World Rally Championship in English, abbreviated WRC) began on January 16 with the Monte Carlo Rally and will end on November 16 at the Rally of Great Britain.

For the production of the WRC, FilmWorks, the Finnish audiovisual services company that will cover the event for the FIA, has selected the solutions of EVS for the second consecutive year.

FilmWorks will offer extensive coverage throughout the championship, including several highlights summaries.

A key requirement for FilmWorks was to have the material available as quickly as possible so that car manufacturers, rights holders and event promoters could have immediate access to the footage, as well as to launch a 26-minute daily highlights programme. In addition to that they produce a 52-minute weekly summary, with the best moments of the week, as well as different video clips for the WRC website. It was absolutely vital to have a system that could address this challenge quickly and efficiently, with complete reliability as demonstrated last year, with an integrated post-production pipeline with EVS IPLink and FCP Exporter.

In a configuration similar to that of 2013, the content recorded on the ENG cameras and that from the cameras installed on board the cars themselves is ingested with ENGSoft. It was then recorded and made immediately available to Final Cut Pro craft editors using the IPDirector PAM suite. Laptops with IPBrowse cards allow different stakeholders to quickly search and access all material. For its part, Xsquare allows the production team to control the transcoding of the material and its transfers, so that the content selected by interested parties is delivered in the required format. Finally, an XS media server is used for SDI playout and contribution.

Jari Vuorenmaa, technical operations manager at FilmWorks, highlighted that "EVS systems allow us to ingest and record a significant amount of multimedia files in a very short period of time. This means that editors can identify, view and retrieve relevant content to begin preparing summaries with highlights. We can then distribute the finished edition to the different stakeholders. Turnaround times in production and airing are actually very fast."

For his part, Marko Viitanen, CEO of FilmWorks, defends that "EVS demonstrated during the 2013 season that they were up to the task, so obviously we are using their solutions again this year. Speed is, without a doubt, essential for us, but so is reliability since there is no room for error, and EVS offers us those guarantees. The system also integrates perfectly with post-production, that is, editors with FCP can see and access the import managed by IPDirector and then export the changes to the XS server for broadcast, which is another big advantage for us.”