EVS Training

On Tuesday, I had a full-day workshop with two representatives from Gearhouse Broadcast, to show us how to operate an EVS XT Nano. This was very interesting for me because I watch a lot of sport on television, and it is in the genre of television that an EVS system really comes into its own. My final year project is also in football broadcasting so I believed it was very important for me to see how the piece of equipment that operates action replays and highlight reels works. EVS are basically the sole manufacturer of these pieces of equipment, and many companies all over the world use it for sport broadcasting and various other forms of television.

Many EVS systems are used during major sporting tournaments such as the European Football Championship and Australian Tennis Open, and you can go back several days or even weeks, right back to the start of the tournament, to find a certain clip that you might need yet didn’t store. EVS systems are also used during the build up in football matches such as creating a dramatic story for the opening sequence, as well as showing past clips of a special guest who may used to have been a player.

ESPN use many EVS systems for their broadcasting of various sports events, and we were told that they have an EVS that is solely used just for their on-screen graphic wipes. But it is not only used in sports broadcasting. To create a highlights package of the night’s acts for viewers to phone vote in a show such as ‘The X Factor’, an EVS system is used. This is simply done by clipping a short, good quality clip from each of the performances, then adding them all to a playlist, and then finally playing the playlist with all the clips being shown automatically one after the other.

We were informed of many practices and techniques that operators and broadcasters use when broadcasting events. Rather than clipping every short sequence you think may be needed, you can simply ‘mark’ an area of the live feed. This can then later be found a lot quicker than spooling through all of the footage, yet it doesn’t take up one of the slots in a bank until you clip it. You can also use this mark feature to mark a section of a sequence where you want to freeze-frame it for a period of time. This is very useful when showing a replay of an offside decision in football, because you can freeze the sequence when the ball has just left the players foot, to see if the player he is passing to is in an offside position or not. Also, some broadcasters will load graphics onto an EVS system as a back up in case the graphics machine goes down during a broadcast. Finally, we were told that production assistants sometimes ask for clips to be striped so that it is easier for them to know how long the clip has been playing for as well as how long there is left.

Here are some photos from the day