ITV 2 & TwoFour

Ibiza Weekender

In the late summer of 2014, we embarked on a trip to Ibiza as ITV 2's 'Weekender' series moved from Magaluf to the White Isle. The show sees a group of reps take young holiday makers under their wing for Balearic fun they'd never forget.

Our role in the show was to ingest all material produced by some 35 'fixed-rig' cameras and a further 4 PSC teams on a rigourous 24 hour schedule. We built an ingest system utilising 2 EVS XT3 servers, and recorded XDCAM HD 422 as the native codec. This lightweight HD codec allows us to maximise storage and design a workflow that delivers both efficiency and, most importantly, security for our client's precious content.

Security is our main area of focus for these fixed-rig shows. We use EVS servers as a tried and tested recording platform for the rig content, and bespoke storage to act as a staging post for the media for the duration of the record and throughout post production. In tandem with this, we created backup SATA disks and LTO tapes of all the content so as to provide 3 copies of all media.

The same '3 copies' approach was taken with the equally precious PSC material, and we are able to produce a lo res version of every card for viewing by the production whilst on location and later in their edit facility.

Of course, when producing 100's of hours of content, it's important to have great metadata. We used EVS's IP Director suite to create rich, in depth logs of everything that happened on location, from breakfast gossip, to drunken ramblings at 4am!

To aid the post production process, all content was transcoded on-the-fly to an Avid-friendly lo res format and organised into projects and bins to allow for immediate editing on return to TwoFour's post production facility.

The aim was to maximise edit time by having all content available to TwoFour's editors as soon as the system returned to the UK, and we were able to deliver that successfully, in collaboration with the team at TwoFour. In addition to instant editing, all of the media was available for searching and browsing in EVS IP Browse desktop workstations that we integrated into the local network, so that the production team could browse everything and do further logging without using expensive edit time.