VRT relies on Matrox Monarch Edge for remote production testing

Belgian television station VRT continues to explore the possibilities of remote production with its coverage of a concert. Matrox Monarch Edge devices were chosen for the job.

The impact of Covid-19 caused VRT to rethink its live workflows. To adapt to the new situation, the broadcaster began a series of simulations to test remote production equipment and ultimately find new ways to share its stories.

VRT decided to employ Matrox’s Monarch Edge encoder/decoder pair for several of these coverages. The initial test involved broadcasting a concert from Ancienne Belgique, a contemporary music venue located in the historic center of Brussels.

Signals from two SDI cameras were fed into the 10-bit Monarch Edge 4:2:2 encoding device. In parallel, a stereo mix was sent from the sound desk using the encoder’s balanced audio input. The solution transported these sources using the SRT streaming protocol at 1080i and 20 Mbps over the public Internet. The images arrived at VRT’s production control room, also located in Brussels, and were received by the Monarch decoding device. The decoded signals were sent as SDI and with embedded audio to the live production environment, where producers cut between the two cameras and added graphics.

New solutions for streaming

From the live production environment, two SDI video signals were fed into a second Monarch Edge encoder. One of these signals was a produced program signal that served as a return channel, while the other was a multiviewer composed of raw A and B camera signals. The Monarch EDGE encoder transported these signals over the public Internet to Ancienne Belgique, again at 1080i and 20 Mbps. Back in Ancienne Belgique, another Edge decoded the two return signals, which could be viewed from several monitors around the room.

According to Floris Daelemans, production innovation researcher at VRT’s Video Snackbar, the Monarch EDGE encoder/decoder pair was “exactly what the network needed” to deliver multi-camera video during their tests: “Matrox Monarch EDGE has turned out to be indispensable for in our remote production testing. The combination of SRT connectivity and ultra-low-latency, visually lossless video encoding makes Monarch EDGE a powerful tool that has allowed our live media production team to test with ease.”