With viewing population of 5.3m people served by five television and seven radio channels, the mandate for Finland’s national broadcasting company, Yle, requires its production facilities in Helsinki and Tampere to support all HD formats. To meet this requirement, Solid State Logic C100 HDS and C10 HD broadcast consoles have been installed in two production studios in Tampere,

‘To complete our move into HD production, we upgraded our smaller live control room with the C10 and built a new room entirely for the C100,’ says Yle Technical Producer, Antti Immonen.

‘The consoles were introduced to us at IBC, and then we visited SSL in England as part of the equipment research process. We were very impressed with what we saw. Broadcasters in general and public broadcasters specifically, really need to watch the bottom line when it comes to expanding production facilities.’

The SSL installation brings the full suite of SSL Production Assistant software packages – including Dialogue Automix for panel-type productions and 5.1 Upmix to create surround audio from stereo tracks. DAW Control offers integrated control of Yle’s Pro Tools system where live programmes are also recorded for future release in different formats. The consoles are connected to the rest of the studio complex through SSL’s Alpha-Link Live I/O units.

‘As both studios are really new, we are just starting to use several of the Production Assistant features with good results,’ Immonen says. ‘Shows that are broadcast in 5.1 usually go through a postproduction stage here in our dedicated postproduction studios. However, in summer, we broadcast live entertainment and sports events, and those productions are in 5.1. The 5.1 Upmix feature gives us the power to easily insert stereo tracks into the mix, maintaining the surround field. We also like the Dialogue Automix feature. We produce some shows where as many as ten people could be talking at one time and this feature makes easy work of this type of production.’

Yle uses Riedel’s MediorNet router for station networking. The integration of the SSL consoles with MediorNet has streamlined the production process.

‘Everything about our facility upgrade is working according to plan or better, including the integration between our router and the SSL digital consoles,’ Immonen reports. ‘For the audio side, the learning curve for the engineering staff was straightforward, as the SSL consoles offer a user interface that is reasonably uncomplicated to learn. Some nice things mentioned by the staff are that you can clearly see all your signals at all times, the sound quality is spot on and they do not have to page down into menus to make changes to a signal. The SSL consoles do what we need them to do for the live broadcast part of our operations.’