RTS television migrates its grading processes to DaVinci Resolve

DaVinci Resolve Studio (Blackmagic Design) has become the grading tool for Swiss television RTS (Swiss Radio Television), pursuing the objectives of reducing expenses and simplifying IT management.

The need to have a software environment con periodic security actions led the team swiss station to rethink your work chain for color grading, a widely used resource in all types of pieces. This situation led RTS to consider alternatives in order to complete a transition towards a more flexible solution with free technical support for computer programs.

Los computer supports for this grading environment presented their own challenges. The RTS team wanted them to present a favorable GPU performance, were silent to be able to grade comfortably and compatible with the storage infrastructure on current network. Functions would also be needed professional SDI supervision and, as it could not be otherwise, complete compatibility with the chosen software solution.

After analyzing the market in depth, the Swiss chain decided to bet on the environments of DaVinci Resolve. In the words of Cyril Moulin, head of electronic newsgathering and post-production at RTS: “Resolve is not limited to grading, but also allows you to work on finishing, final version and conforming, which meant that we could replace several tools with one,” said Moulin. “Since it is already widely used in the industry and has a modern interface, the transition was quite easy.”

RTS's new technological approach to color grading

RTS turned to systems Mac Studio M3 Ultra with 28 CPU cores, 60 GPU cores and 256GB of RAM built into a Sonnet xMac Studio Echo III case. Each system consisted of a capture and playback card DeckLink 8K Pro G2 for SDI signals, a network adapter 10/25 GbE to connect to storage drives, and two cards 4TB NVMe SSD for cache and backup mode DaVinci Resolve Studio.

"This combination of computers is quiet, compact and perfectly optimized for DaVinci Resolve. The Mac Studio computers were a natural choice because they offer native integration with DaVinci Resolve through Apple Silicon chips (GPU/CPU/unified memory) and provide a stable system, plus the performance of the GPU and AI processing is excellent. The Sonnet case allowed us to add basic professional equipment, such as a DeckLink card, to monitor images and have a stable connection for storage," he explains. Moulin.

RTS addressed the migration by offering a training week for users, pre-migration testing on Mac Studio systems, and synchronizing the transition with the end of support contracts for the solution they were previously using. DaVinci Resolve Studio is currently integrated into the broadcaster's existing network storage infrastructure, and it is considering implementing new archiving and management systems for audiovisual and multimedia content.