Craven Arms, UK – 17th Feb 2015 – Rascular, the leading supplier of PC-based multi-device control, has today announced that a global broadcaster has deployed the company’s Helm to control the complex routing requirements for its multi-country broadcast of Nik Wallenda’s latest daredevil tightrope walk.
Wallenda, a renowned tightrope walker, completed the two Chicago challenges on November 2nd from the iconic Marina City’s west tower to the Leo Burnett Building. Walking at over 50 stories high above the Chicago River his feat set two new Guinness world records.
The programme aired live around the world in tens of countries. This required complex routing control, which is where Helm came in. The broadcaster, a long-time Helm customer across its playout operation, was able to use Helm’s user-defined panel construction to build precisely the routing control that it needed.
Three workstations provided frame-accurate switching across 25 scheduled channels, selecting from 30 different live sources, 50 local video server sources plus three breakdown loop sources. In addition, Helm was able to control Grass Valley Imagestores for bugs and breakdown captions in case of lost feeds or other failures. This was not a used but provided additional peace of mind.
As well as the three main workstations there was an ‘All Channels’ panel with all 25 channels represented, each with six sources and three destinations. Plus there were two engineering panels – one allowing monitor switching of the incoming lines, processing stages and finally the 30 live feeds available to the channels; the other allowing routing of the incoming lines into the feed processing chains again in case of lost feeds. It all worked exactly as it should.
Roddy Pratt, Technical Director with Rascular, said, “Helm is all about providing operators with a quick yet powerful way to benefit from not only day-to-day precision control but also to the ability to cater for such huge, complex events. We are really pleased to have been involved with the project and that it was so successful for this broadcaster.”
About Rascular:
Rascular is a broadcast software company based in the UK. It specialises in highly evolved device control and media management tools that provide operators with direct access to third-party hardware technologies. Flagship product Helm allows customers to pick best-of-breed systems – branding devices, routers, video servers, VTRs, multi-image display processors and modular gear – from a range of different manufactures and provides a single, integrated, user-defined control/monitoring surface for operators. Helm, along with Commander, Mediant and the ET Updater range, is deployed by broadcasters and playout providers globally. Used by over 150 broadcasters globally including Discovery Communications Europe, BSkyB, Red Bee Media, M-Net, Sky Italia and ARD. For more information visit www.rascular.com
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