Providing instant tapeless production and immediate review

The Customer

Thoroughbred Racing Productions (TRP) is a premium sports company that provides exclusive High Definition production services to the Victorian Racing Industry, producing broadcasts for more than 525 thoroughbred race meetings conducted throughout the State. These broadcasts are provided for Free-To-air and Pay-TV channels in both Australia and overseas, to On-course Patrons and importantly the Stipendiary Stewards who manage the integrity of Racing. That means delivering premium sports vision that not only captures the spectacular excitement of thoroughbred racing but also the finer detail. When TRP commissioned Sony to develop its new fleet of High Definition Outside Broadcast Vans, it wanted only the best. The result is a racing production machine that can cut it with any sportscasters in the world. TRP expert team ensures that each project is delivered at optimum quality. To make broadcast coverage of Australian thoroughbred racing a world leader, TRP produces over 3500 hours of High Definition live thoroughbred racing outside broadcasts each year. That’s a track record that’s hard to beat.

The Challenge

Thoroughbred Racing Productions workflow environment requires the most solid technology, able to achieve the maximum efficiency with a fast turnaround of content. The nature of the services provided by TRP includes a range of professional and broadcast formats and demands the most interoperable systems, able to answer to its customers’ specific needs. To maximize the live viewing experience of the audience on and off the course and offer a review system for the steward’s team, helping them in their judging decisions, TRP had the need to acquire equipment able to meet the following requirements:

• Compact equipment, suitable to OB vans;
• Dual SD and HD Channels Support
• High Resolution and Proxy Capture;
• Immediate availability of contents for stewards revision;
• Integration with third-party MAM;
• Mobile Contents through Removable Disks and USB Pens.

The Solution

Providing instant tapeless production and immediate review

Acquiring mxfSPEEDRAIL S1000, TRP has increased the power and flexibility of its services. MOG’s SDI Recorder generates MXF OP1a high resolution and proxy MP4 files simultaneously, making it a perfect fit for such a complex and competitive production workflow. Delivered in compact units, the system is also completely scalable, decreasing the need for extra automation systems and making it the perfect fit for OB vans. With 4 OB vans shooting all the excitement and colour of the races, before, during and after the event, TRP needed a powerful and flexible recording system able to reduce the complexity of multi-camera environments. Thus, mxfSPEEDRAIL S1000 is used to capture the High Resolution and proxy files into a removable e-SATA disk, then transferred directly into TRP’s MAM system. Specific file material is captured at the same time on USB pen drive for racing officials to take away directly from the track. The drive contents are easily transported to TRP’s headquarters and uploaded, so all the racing days footage is accessible to the steward’s either on the track, in the office or at home via PC tablet or smart phone if required. The stewards can also review specific sequences of the race, using selected timecode and metadata fields. Using the Low Resolution version of the clips, also allows them to load past race clips in a faster and easer way. When dealing with Australia’s premium racing code, TRP required a workflow that not only delivered reliable and repeatable performance, the quality had to be of the highest order for the long term preservation of the code, this then provided the platform from which the file material was instantly available for the editors, production department, other stakeholders and very importantly the stewards panel. Using mxfSPEEDRAIL has dramatically increased the performance of TRP Production workflow, allowing staff to concentrate on delivering value to all stakeholders.