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 para señales SDI, un adaptador de red 10/25 GbE para conectarse a unidades de almacenamiento, y dos tarjetas SSD NVMe de 4TB para la memoria caché y el modo de respaldo de DaVinci Resolve Studio.

“Esta combinación de equipos es silenciosa, compacta y está perfectamente optimizada para DaVinci Resolve. Los equipos Mac Studio fueron una opción natural porque ofrecen integración nativa con DaVinci Resolve a través de chips Apple Silicon (GPU/CPU/memoria unificada) y proporcionan un sistema estable; además el desempeño de la GPU y el procesamiento por IA es excelente. La carcasa Sonnet nos permitió incorporar equipamiento profesional básico, por ejemplo, una tarjeta de DeckLink, para supervisar imágenes y disponer de una conexión estable para el almacenamiento”, explica Moulin.

RTS abordó la migración ofreciendo una semana de formación para los usuarios, pruebas previas a la migración en sistemas Mac Studio y sincronizando la transición con la fecha en que finalizaban los contratos de soporte técnico de la solución que usaban anteriormente. Actualmente, DaVinci Resolve Studio está integrado en la infraestructura de almacenamiento en red existente de la emisora, y se está planteando la posibilidad de implementar nuevos sistemas de archivo y gestión de contenidos audiovisuales y multimedia.