The Cannes Festival is the world’s leading film festival and film market. Over 1,000 films are shown during the festival, with thousands of professionals in attendance from across the world, making it a media showcase like no other. To share this passion for cinema and glamour, over the past few years, the organisers have set up a temporary television channel. To do this, they delegate the executive production to a producer and, this year, the project was awarded to 2P2L. Several technical providers were working together on this ambitious project, including the VIDELIO – Cap Ciné group. In order to meet the requirements of such a demanding project, the long-term partners Télévision du Festival and VIDELIO – Cap Ciné had deployed a major post-production, broadcasting and shared storage system from Avid.
One of the main difficulties of the project was the many channels of distribution. In fact, signals have to be produced in different languages, packaged or not, and for different purposes (multi-language international signals, contributing signals, VOD, streaming, etc.). Each day, an average of around 10 hours of programming were produced using this system. In fact, the schedule varies depending on the number of films screened each day. On site, the production teams talk about a “film block”. A film block is made up of a photo call, interviews with actors and the director, a press conference, a red carpet and at the end, a presentation of images of the guests. These film blocks were available in French, English and the original language (if it’s not French or English).
The nerve centre of production and post-production for Télévision du Festival was on level -1 of the Palais. The resources provided for post-production by VIDELIO – Cap Ciné were assembled at this site. As well as supplying Télévision du Festival, the company also provided post-production resources to OCS for the magazine programme produced on site every day for the Festival.
This is the first year that 2P2L was managing the production of Télévision du Festival. To mark this occasion, the producer has decided to create new magazine programmes and to put more effort into graphic packaging. Various programmes have been produced: Le Breakfast, Happy Hour, etc.
With these magazine programmes, it was important vary the broadcasts and minimise repeats. Producing four magazine programmes a day with reports and commentators takes a colossal amount of work. Avid solutions were able to manage the flow, providing security and proven optimisation of workflows. For the production of Télévision du Festival, five Avid Media Composer platforms were used. Two machines were used to acquire and process data (introducing and formatting content). Editing was managed by the remaining three Media Composer platforms.
All of the content was saved on two 8 TB Avid AirSpeed 5500 servers. One of the AirSpeeds was used for the packaged, branded content and the second one was used for Clean programmes. The AirSpeed server with the packaged content was also used as a player for re-broadcasting the daily playlist.
All the Media Composer software and AirSpeed servers were connected to a 2 x 32 TB ISIS storage system. “This storage volume was much bigger than we needed, mainly to make sure we had enough bandwidth”, said Vincent Hautefort.
The centralised storage system was used for both Télévision du Festival and OCS channel content. For the OCS channel, there were three additional Media Composer platforms (a technical machine and two editing machines). 2P2L also produces the cinema magazine programme for OCS.
During the Cannes Festival, 2P2L had a team of 70 people including editors and technicians. “The aim was to personalise the channel with new faces like Anne Seften and a higher profile for Sophie Soulignac, as well as better known faces such as Didier Allouch and Pierre Zeni. We have also suggested to the Executive Director of the Festival, Thierry Frémaux, that the graphic packaging should be more in line with the various programmes and better integrated with the Festival branding, including the microphones used for reports! One of the other changes was the addition of new events, early in the morning or late in the evening, with more discussion panels and reports. We were able meet this challenge and this pace of production partly thanks to the technical flexibility of the AVID solutions and the availability of the Vidélio Cap Ciné teams”, said Jérôme Caza, producer and president of 2P2L.
Rigorous preparation!
Ahead of Cannes Festival, numerous weekly meetings have taken place since March on how to implement such a tool. “Once all the requirements had been set out, we obtained the equipment and added to it if anything was missing. By mid-April, the equipment had been installed, configured and tested at our Parisian sites. Then a week before the Festival started, 50 m3 of equipment was sent from Paris to Cannes. For all of our customers on site. The Grand Journal must be ready from the night before the opening, which means Tuesday. This requires faultless precision, however our experience did help us to anticipate our clients’ needs as much as possible,” says Vincent Hautefort.
