Sean Jones is involved in the IBC Accelerator “Connect and Produce Anywhere” and is working with audio company Lama to demonstrate how an entire broadcast can be completely encapsulated in software hosted on a private cluster.

The Connect and Produce Anywhere (CAPA) IBC Accelerator recently assembled its team to conduct a real-world lab test and explore how the project could be scaled for world-class event production.

The team moved into a room in the media complex at Formula E’s London E-Prix at Excel on July 20. CAPA was at Formula E at the behest of the electric racing series’ sponsor, Google. The test ran over the course of the weekend using standard hardware running on the Google Cloud cluster.

Many of the project partners were on site at Formula E, including Zixi, TSL, Lama, Vizrt, Techex and two graduates from the Channel 4 project manager, both of whom are broadcast engineer apprentices. Tia Shenton was project manager for the weekend and Sean Jones worked with Lama on the audio side of the project. Also on site were Techex, who provided and managed Formula E’s video sources, Tag Video Systems, who provided multiviewer functionality, and TSL, who provided tally and control.

Speaking about Vizrt’s role in the project and live broadcasts of Formula E in Excel, Liam Hayter, Product Manager at Vizrt, said: “We basically provide image mixing with Vizrt TriCaster Vector, which is our live production system that normally runs in AWS instances, but of course there’s a good way to bring that along and run it in the Google Distributed Cloud edge cluster. So we provide that for image mixing and also do instant replay with our 3Play system. So that gives us live replay and speed control of the sources. And finally we also bring some connectivity with the Viz Connect product, so that’s where we can interact with protocols and other standards and also provide remote connectivity so we can easily connect that to 5G, work with limited bandwidth over NDI and reduce the bandwidth that we need on site. So that’s kind of part of the elements that we provide here to interact with everyone else.”

Tia Shenton, a trainee broadcast engineer at Channel 4, was project manager for the IBC Accelerator Connect and Produce Anywhere team at Formula E’s London E-Prix.

Rosanna Prada, senior broadcast systems engineer, who was on site during the live test to guarantee the physical equipment, comments on what Techex brings to the party: “Techex provides a place to house the physical hardware between unboxing and testing in a live situation. There are a number of servers and switches that we house in our lab between events so they can be used by the extended CAPA team to set things up and then test them before we take them out into the real world and see what happens with them.

“The other part that Techex provides is our software, Techex Edge, which we use for video transport. In this particular implementation here at Formula E, we take a multicast video from Formula E and then pass it on to SRT to distribute it.”

Meanwhile, Jeroen Dixon, CTO at Lama, comments on what his company did at the Formula E test weekend: “So we record the audio and we actually do two parts. We convert the Dante audio to NDI audio and then send it to the cluster. And then the cluster runs the rest of our software stack, which makes all the connections between the different feeds and the mix and does the actual mixing.”

“And here we are also testing AutoMix, which we developed together with Eurosport. Basically we do two mixes in parallel, a manual mix and an automatic mix. That’s our thing that we do here.”

CAPA will present some of its findings at the IBC Show in Amsterdam in September