ITV will be launching its new UTV regional News facilities in Belfast at the end of this month, marking the successful completion of a two-year project to rollout HD production and streamline its News production workflow across six regional centres. The infrastructure, designed and built by Systems Integrator IPE, relies on Axon Digital’s Cerebrum as the control and management hub at the heart of all News operations.

Regional News is an important part of ITV’s overall contribution to public service broadcasting in the UK. Great attention was given in the system design to provide a template-approach to streamline the workflow so that it efficiently delivers high quality content to the millions of viewers who tune in each week.

“Robust, reliable control was critical within the system design and simplicity, flexibility and ease of use were the main features ITV demanded,” explained IPE’s Director Ray Bragg. “Cerebrum removes obstacles and over-complication in the workflow and with such operational ease, wide functionality and integration it was the obvious choice in our infrastructure template for all ITV’s locations.”

The first phase of the project saw the delivery of HD News facilities in the Channel Islands, Tyne Tees, Bristol and Birmingham Central within a tight timeframe of 4-week intervals, closely followed by East Anglia in 2017.

At each site, Cerebrum provides an overarching control hub for routing, signal processing, tally control with tight integration of IFB, audio and communications. It also supports remote access for additional control and trouble-shooting. Through a user-friendly, task-sensitive graphical interface, the workflow is simplified and operators can easily master customization of tasks for specific local requirements.

“Multi-skilling is at the heart of ITV’s approach to News production and with Cerebrum control, you don’t need to be a technical expert to run the system,” says Steve Teague, ITV’s Head of Technical Services. “It simplifies the process with a powerful logic that shields the operator from complexity and gives them the freedom to focus on the content. Cerebrum has streamlined the whole process significantly so that tasks can be done in less time and that’s given our operators a greater degree of confidence.”

The latest phase to be delivered in Northern Ireland - perhaps the most ambitious to date - has seen the move to a brand new building and a complete technical infrastructure upgrade. Following pre-build and commissioning at IPE’s headquarters in Hertfordshire, the install was completed on site in March and, following training of multi-skilled operational staff, the system is due to go live at the start of July.

The UTV Belfast facilities, which will deliver a main News programme for the 6pm slot and shorter bulletins throughout the day, feature a studio with four Sony cameras and News-room with a Panasonic PTZ tilt and zoom camera; four Avid edit suites and an ingest traffic area. Core routing is provided by Grass Valley, with a Sony vision mixer, Black Magic graphics, SSL sound mixing and Clearcom talkback – all seamlessly controlled by Cerebrum through its powerful yet user-friendly graphical interface.

Both ITV and IPE have been impressed by the technology deployed and its ease of integration but also the customer support and training they have received from Axon. Bragg concludes, “We’ve all been extremely pleased with Axon’s support across the course of this project and have had brilliant access to the development team. This has meant that ITV’s staff have been able to quickly get comfortable with the system and at an early stage were able to master 95% of system configurations in-house. Cerebrum provides such ease of use, flexibility and solid reliability that deployment has been stress-free across all six sites.”

Commenting on the project, Adrian Richmond Sales Director UK and Africa added, “The adoption of Cerebrum continues to go from strength to strength, whether in live sports or News production, and today it offers even greater 3rd party integration. The immediate benefits for our clients can be seen in how happy operators are with the functionality it delivers and the time and production costs it saves.”

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About Axon

Headquartered in The Netherlands, and with offices across the world, Axon develops, manufactures and markets high quality broadcast equipment for the conversion, processing and compliance recording of audio and video signals. Products integrate advanced signal processing techniques, innovative engineering and modular flexibility and provide high quality, affordability and reliability within mission-critical broadcast applications. For more information please visit www.axon.tv.