Among the world’s largest music festivals, Rock in Rio’s 2019 outing saw Drake, Foo Fighters, Bon Jovi, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Iron Maiden, P!nk and Muse on the Palco Mundo stage, with Seal & Bahian Xenia, Whitesnake, Jessie J and Slayer among the acts on the Sunset stage – all broadcast live by Globosat using IP infrastructure based on technology from IP broadcast pioneer, Lawo.

The ten-day event took place at the Barra Olympic Park in Rio, with an audience of over 45m viewers across Brazil, and saw GloboSat pair a remote production set-up at the TV compound (the Cidade do Roc, orRock City) with GloboSat’s production centre approximately 15km away via two 2x 80Gbit/s optical fiber paths (Red and Blue).

The TV compound was designed as the central point to collect all signals coming from the various stages. The smaller stages including the Sunset Stage were equipped with Lawo V__remote4 units for Video and Audio to IP conversion and signal processing, relaying the feeds to the TV compound located closely to the Palco Mundo main stage.

Given the relatively small distance, all 16 cameras and the audio feeds from the main stage were transmitted to the TV compound’s infrastructure via SDI. The TV compound’s redundant IP infrastructure was built on Arista 7280 switches and Lawo V__matrix for converting baseband SDI signals to IP, processing and compression of video signals and furnishing the multiviewers. One of the V__matrix C100 blades was used to generate a multiviewer mosaic with 24 PiPs whose layout was prepared with Lawo’s theWall software. The other software-defined C100 blades were dedicated to processing and conversion tasks. In total, 28 1080i HD feeds and VC2-compressed 4K feeds were used for the video. At GloboSat’s HQ, the facility’s V__matrix infrastructure received the HD and 4K feeds plus the discrete audios from the TV compound for remote production.

‘We used Lawo to encapsulate the signals and transport them to the Globosat HQ, which allowed us to work from home, in our familiar infrastructure and to record everything,’ says Globosat Development Manager, Alexandre Torres. ‘IP has become a necessity for us. We operate dozens of channels originating from different contribution locations. IP furthermore allows us to engage in remote production, to easily automate certain routines and to share our signals with external parties. Setup times shrink and a significantly larger number of channels can be transported over a single cable at a much higher quality than in the past.’

For monitoring and ensuring signal integrity of all the ST2110 feeds of the production, GloboSat used Lawo’s smartScope Deep Packet Media Inspection and Network Analyzing solution. Being installed on a server at main facility, it also allowed on-site monitoring at the remote TV compound via smartScope’s web interface.

The immersive Dolby Atmos audio mix was produced at Globosat’s HQ using a Lawo mc²96 production console. The console and it’s Nova73 HD audio router also handled all audio routing for the complete 4K and HD productions. The sound engineers worked with 256 audio channels (128 per stage), which were recorded and distributed to various locations. The router inside a Lawo mc²96 console allows to manage up to 256 IP streams, making it ideal for routing in complex multi-site audio set-ups.

‘We recorded up to 256 audio channels. We received streams, we generated streams, routed them to various locations and converted Ravenna streams to Madi and Dante or vice versa. This is only possible with a router like the one in the mc²96,’ says Gabriel Thomazini, Operational Audio Coordinator at Globosat. ‘One of the aspects I particularly love about the Lawo consoles is their authentic, clear sound that is a faithful reflection of an instrument’s timbre. I suspect this can be attributed to the manufacturer’s German precision.’

The Rock in Rio remote production was not first of its kind for Globo. Being renowned for pioneering broadcast in Brazil with the first broadcast live in 4k and Dolby Atmos in 2015, the broadcaster has been sing remote broadcast at various occasions including the 4K broadcast of Carnival in Rio and the coverage of the Brazil Football League.

More: www.lawo.com