Thoughts on EVS Integration with Final Cut

I’ve been a fan of Tom Meegan’s work for a long time — especially when he wrote about it for Edit Well. He principally works at the high-end of broadcast television.

Anyway, after my review of Telestream’s Pipeline in the current edition of my monthly Final Cut newsletter, Tom sent me the following, which I thought you might also be interested in.

NOTE: EVS is a high-end, real-time, random-access video playback system that is principally used in live sports events.

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Just read your review of the Pipeline with great interest. Excellent!

Here is a heads up about what EVS is up to with FCP integration. They have the FCP playback while recording feature dialed in pretty well using ProRes for HD and IMX 50 for SD. We did this over a gigabit network using a Dell managed switch, and some expertise and advise from Small Tree Communications. We had five FCP stations (three mac pros and two laptops) on the network with the EVS all working on ProRes files and it worked very well.

I provided the FCP Mac Pro systems and Martijn Swart with EVS provided the expertise to get the EVS (DOS and Windows based) playing nicely with our Apple gear. Basically we had one share point that everyone joined as SMB rather than AFP, and we were good to go. One laptop was owned by one of our editors who used it to do file based captures while he continued to edit on the Mac Pro, and the other laptop was owned by our Director, who would help out with editing tasks as well as produced daily internet features for FIBT.com.

We used the streaming feature (ability to edit in FCP while recording) to turn around up to seven one hour packaged shows for NBC/Universal while producing almost ten hours of live multi-camera content each weekend.

The editor would string the shows out based on a format during the live broadcast, so when the producer came into edit after the international feed went off the air, the bulk of the show was done. All that was left was to add finishing touches. Once we started live shows, one of the Mac Pros was dedicated to turning these shows around and spitting them out to Digital Beta so we could uplink the shows, and have a hard copy back-up.

I’m pretty sure this is working on the Avid side as well. I was at XGames working FCP, but we were a bit Balkanized compared to the Avid station where most of the craft editing was happening. FCP stations were being used to stream line last minute edits in the live trucks.

Both the FCP integration with EVS and the fact that we had five FCP station working on ProRes at once over gigabit ethernet were were pretty cool. I know you have a lot of things to cover at NAB, but a visit to Small Tree Communications to talk to them about how they are making this work over gigabit ethernet, and EVS to talk about how they are making things so easy with FCP, might be worth your while.

I’m not under any kind of contract with either of these companies, I’m just a happy customer of Small Tree, and a very happy operator of EVS products since 1998.

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