EVS Supports Live Production for Belgium’s Tomorrowland Electronic Music Festival

EVS, a leading provider of live video production systems, was selected to provide its entertainment solutions at Tomorrowland – one of the world’s most famous electronic dance music festivals that took place on July 26-29, 2013. EVS technology was central to the live production setup, enabling extra browsing and content management functionality through solutions including its XT3 server and IPDirector content management suites.

ID&T Belgium, the organizer of Tomorrowland, commissioned CK Productions to run the production of Tomorrowland TV – an online live streaming channel of the festival on YouTube that attracted over eight million viewers worldwide on each day of the festival in 2012. This year Tomorrowland TV produced a total of fifteen hours of live video content including coverage from the three main stages on its YouTube channel. EVS technology was provided by Broadcast Rental and implemented into CK Productions’ workflow to be used in the main gallery.

EVS also powered Tomorrowland TV’s broadcast center gallery – the dedicated location for the production of feed gathering and transmission, including video highlights, high-end edits and exclusive DJ interviews. The press center used EVS IPBrowse for advanced tapeless distribution for accredited press. EVS also enabled integration on the main stage with a NAC Hypermotion camera through its XT3 server to manage high quality HyperSlowMo replays.

The production workflow consisted of two XT3 servers in the gallery – one to handle the playout for the live YouTube channel, and another to ingest all incoming streams. The gallery servers were controlled by EVS’ IPDirector production asset management suite to assist the playout operator. In each of the OB vans an assistant director used IPLogger, an IPDirector application, to enrich content with descriptive metadata based on what was happening on stage and in the crowd.

An IPDirector suite also handled the press media management workflow by publishing clips from the nearline storage so it could be accessed by IPBrowse users in the press center. In the artist’s viewing lounge, the performance sessions were cued up by the IPDirector so the artist could control the playout using a dedicated LSM remote.

In addition, several of EVS’ IPBrowse were deployed throughout the workflow – one used by the clearing manager to verify publications, and another for the YouTube clip-based upload to the Tomorrowland YouTube channel. 90% of all press delivery was tapeless, using hard drives and only two tape dumps on press VTRs for baseband playout. Three XTAccess stations with Xsquare were also present to handle the media orchestration of the workflow and instant media conforming. EVS’ IPLink plugin importer for the Final Cut Pro edit suites allowed the editors to have instant access to IPLogger metadata to track and find best content. After this, the final edits were simultaneously sent to the playout server and nearline using EVS Final CutPro exporter.

“Due to the unique concept of Tomorrowland TV the need for a fast and flexible setup is a must and there’s no room for error,” says CK Productions. “To integrate a digital logging and clipping system throughout the whole process has not only made our work easier, but it also has given a boost to the quality of content that we’ve made. For a project of this nature, we needed solutions that were up to the job of extending our setup and EVS’ reputation and impressive portfolio of live entertainment productions made them an obvious choice.”

“Tomorrowland is a fantastic project for EVS Entertainment to showcase its expertise in live entertainment productions,” explains Henry Alexander, SVP Entertainment and News division at EVS. “Our systems enable production companies to operate efficiently and quickly which was vital in this instance as content needed to be instantly available for various people on various platforms. We tailored the workflow to fit with CK Productions’ particular requirements, selecting solutions that would fit in with their existing products to complete the production process and get it to air efficiently.”