Pro AV Catalog

COLOGNE — April 11, 2023 — Studio Berlin GmbH, a technical service provider in Germany for TV productions and outside broadcast as part of Studio Hamburg Group, with headquarters in Berlin and offices in Cologne and Lüneburg, has recently increased the channel density of their own ingest servers.

Studio Berlin offers a broad portfolio of services and solutions to realize small to large TV productions. "TV studios in Berlin and Hamburg for show and political talk formats, a fleet of 4 state-of-the-art OB vans for sports and entertainment shows as well as flight case solutions for reality TV and show productions worldwide. Post-production facilities in Cologne, Berlin and Munich and an IT research and development department based in Cologne, complete the range of services," says Martin Oberdorfer, Head of IT at Studio Berlin. 

"Our company captures the biggest entertainment, reality TV, political, sports, and TV series shows, and we also post-produce the content," says Oberdorfer.   

"More than 15 years ago, when a tape-based workflow was still the standard, we started developing our own tapeless recording servers to provide complete production workflows in combination with our own video asset management systems. 

We specialize in automated non-stop 24/7 recordings for productions that require high reliability and availability for daily episodes. Studio Berlin started with 1x channel systems and expanded to 16x channels as technology evolved. Over the years we have gained experience in several hundred production deployments with well over a million hours recorded. 

In August we recorded 24x 1080p50 feeds for a concert and in October we used two 24-channel servers for International Emmy nominated Amazon Studio comedy show "LOL - Last One Laughing" in Germany, produced by Constantin Entertainment for Prime Video. 

We've now reached 24x simultaneous FHD ingest channels count on a single video server, using 2x DLE5/X2/100 and an M264S4/100 which we control with Matrox DSX SDK. 

At the same time, this configuration allows us to record UHD at 8x 2160p25, which is enough for certain reality formats, or 8x 2160p50 with a second M264S4/100 for shows and concerts. 

It is great to be able to bring only one system to a production site, when we used to send multiple servers, especially in times of rising costs for transportation and energy, compact systems not only help to save money, but also to protect the environment." 

"The Matrox DSX SDK is incredible. It has been around for 19 years and it is still the preferred platform for the development of live video application on Windows®/Linux®, regardless of the I/O connectivity required (multichannel SDI, ST-2110, or even compressed IP), and the number of Matrox DSX users keeps growing. 

Matrox Video commits a considerable amount of engineering effort to bring development tools to the market to help target live video production in the Cloud. It is fair to say that there are still numerous successful applications for 12G/3G SDI or ST-2110 workflows," commented Christophe Crespin, OEM Sales Manager at Matrox Video, EMEA. 

"Studio Berlin have a small but very performant engineering team. At Matrox Video, we are very proud to see them achieve this new channel density benchmark using our DSX SDK and OEM product lines." 

"We have other ideas that we would like to experiment with in the short term," says Martin Oberdorfer. "One would be to cover some specific productions where an ST-2110 infrastructure already exists and use the Matrox DLE5Q25 or X.mio5 Q25 NIC cards, which can support up to 32x 1080i simultaneous ingest and playout channels per NIC, enabling us to go even higher using multiple cards. 

This will depend on how quickly the number of cameras increase on these shows, and when they will start transitioning from SDI to ST-2110, but this is something we want to look at in early 2023. 

On our side, we're ready. Our X.mio5 ST-2110 NICs use the exact same DSX SDK as the 12G/3G SDI cards so we handle time stamped video and audio buffers in the same way we do with our current SDI application. All the complexity of ST-2110, NMOS, PTP clock, 2022-7, telemetry tools will either be managed by the X.mio5 IP or the SDK."