Avid Everywhere Powers Tour de France Coverage for France Télévisions

Avid® (Nasdaq: AVID) today announced that France Télévisions is harnessing the power of Avid Everywhere™ to produce daily highlights coverage of the world’s most prestigious cycling race, the 2015 Tour de France. The post-production team is relying on a powerful and highly collaborative workflow, built on the Avid MediaCentral™ Platform, to manage the huge volume of race footage and create compelling packages under extremely tight deadlines. The 2015 Tour de France started with the Grand Départ in Utrecht, Netherlands on July 4, and finishes with the victory parade on July 26 on the Champs-Elysées, Paris.

Gilles Parcq, Technical Manager, France Télévisions, said, “The Tour de France is a major sporting event on our production calendar, and it is crucial that we get our coverage right. We needed a robust post-production solution that could be set up easily each day, and that would enable us to manage a significant amount of content to help our editors find and work with the right clips. The combination of creativity and reliability offered by the Avid workflow fulfilled all our requirements.”   

France Télévisions’ Outside Broadcast (OB) vehicle, which is traveling with the Tour, houses a comprehensive Avid post-production workflow based on Avid Interplay® | Production, Avid ISIS® shared storage, and Avid Media Composer® editing stations. The third-party integration offered by the Avid MediaCentral Connectivity Toolkit enables logged content from EVS video servers in a separate OB truck to feed directly to two Avid ISIS | 5500 shared storage systems. The Interplay | Production suite includes extensive media production and asset management tools that allow the production team to quickly view, sort and select clips to create compelling highlights packages. This task is greatly simplified by the continuity of metadata generated throughout the production chain.

“With the huge volume of assets it generates every day and the need for lightning-fast turnarounds, The Tour de France is a tremendous undertaking – not only for the cyclists and their support teams, but also for the broadcast production teams covering the event,” said Jeff Rosica, senior vice president, Worldwide Field Operations, Avid. “Avid is proud to be partnering with France Télévisions to help them share the daily excitement and intensity of this incredible race with their viewers.”