48 PARTNER VISIT Lawo
WE ARE ALWAYS LOOKING AT SUSTAINABLE SUCCESS – FOR US AND OUR CUSTOMERS TOO – AND THAT DOESN’T HAPPEN OVER QUARTERS, IT HAPPENS OVER YEARS
These components are highly complex but also highly customised. The process has acquired a fascinating balance between rigid adherence to extremely precise technical parameters and the ability to creatively meet highly individual customer requirements at any point in the process. With so much digital connectivity in Lawo products, parts of the factory resemble more a computer component vendor, with boards and digital components all manufactured on-site. At the end of our tour of the Lawo factory, we were greeted by a fully assembled top-of-the-line mixing desk waiting final inspection by a top national broadcaster. Despite it being crammed with the latest Lawo has to offer, what came to mind was not so much logic-board stuffed digital tool, but a top-end, custom sports car, something hand-built and guaranteed to perform. OFFERING CONTROL About five years ago Lawo acquired VSM with the goal of developing and expanding its reach across all IP-based video production, while keeping up VSM’s independent, vender-agnostic approach. VSM is a software solution that gives greater control to the engineers and creatives working in the gallery of a
broadcast production. A live broadcast has to integrate multiple components from vision mixing to comms to audio. VSM provides the control layer that makes it easy to see and to operate each piece of hardware in the workflow and to quickly reconfigure it for different scenarios. Rather than operators having to learn and operate interfaces for every single bit of gear, VSM organises and simplifies control and opens it up to any authorised person in the workflow. The VSM team is semi-autonomous, taking up an entire floor of a building in Wiesbaden, outside Frankfurt. In contrast to Lawo’s manufacturing facility in Rastatt, the VSM team, except for a few simple hardware interfaces, is almost entirely software centric. “It’s all keyboards, monitors and mouse here,” jokes Axel Kern, Lawo’s senior product manager for control products. VSM was first developed in the world of systems integrators, fulfilling the needs of OB truck operators, and so it has been designed to integrate perfectly into the world of live broadcast production. Odds are good that if you’ve watched any big live events over the past decade, you’ve seen a workflow controlled by VSM. “I would say that VSM is the control standard in the world right now,” says Kern.
“I don’t think there is any system even close to our install base, which is now about 2000 to 2500 installs worldwide. SHRINKING DISTANCES Control solutions like VSM do more than just make existing workflows easier to manage, however. An all-IP production environment can also now offer the ability to extend that control to any device, anywhere in the world. Broadcast service provider, NEP Australia, has been using Lawo’s software- defined V__matrix IP routing, processing and multiviewing platform to build up a huge, continent-spanning, decentralised remote production infrastructure. The IP- based VSM control layer flexibly allocates pooled video and audio processing resources available on the network to individual workflows and productions, allowing a team in Sydney control over the broadcast of an event happening anywhere, ie in Perth. In the days of SDI, a broadcaster would be facing an expensive, multi-day trip just to get the gear on-site.
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