Germanys public broadcaster ARD has chosen international broadcast house MCI and broadcast manufacturer Quantel to design and equip its new production installation for ARDs main Berlin studio (‘ARD-Hauptstadtstudio’). MCI received the order from ARD-Hauptstadtstudio in December last year for the planning and installation of two sQ server systems. Six Quantel sQ Edit Plus craft editors, a Paintbox graphics system and 30 sQ View desktop browsing applications complete the package.
The sQ servers offer a total of 18 I/O ports and a storage capacity of 220 hours at 50Mbit/s. They are controlled by Quantels QRecord and QPlay ingest and playout automation. Browsing the material on the sQ server is done in low res at the sQ View stations. These are part of the general network at the ARD-Hauptstadtstudio and make browsing and shot selection an easy job, ready for refining on the sQ Edit Plus craft editors. The complete system environment is based on Quantels own database management system ISA (Integrated Server Architecture) which locks browse and broadcast material together under a single system-wide database.
According to Torsten Andresen, Project Leader at MCI, The decision to use Quantel was made easy because the technology perfectly fits our customers demands.
Installation starts at the end of February 2006. MCI plans to start the trial operation in mid May in order to have the new facility ready to go by the end of July 2006.