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IBIS have trotted their way to success in Sweden with the launch of their Horse Racing Logger Tool, a unique application based on existing IBIS technology which enables the fast turn-around of video clips from race meetings.
Swedish horse racing is unusual as 99% of the events are trotting races, in which the horses – which are not allowed to gallop - pull small traps carrying the riders. It’s hugely popular and is the country’s second biggest spectator sport.
The logger tool has been installed at Kanal 75 in Stockholm, which manages the country's horse racing video distribution by satellite to betting and other outlets. It enables the automatic capture of metadata which is then tracked through the video acquisition process.
Used to log highlights of horse races across Sweden it can handle over eight track meetings every day. Each meeting can have up to 18 races and each race up to 24 horses.
The metadata comes from the betting company AB Trav och Galopp (ATG) - which is owned by the horse racing industry and also owns Kanal 75. Its vast data structure is constantly being updated with information about courses, distance, time, horses, riders, colours and past performance and, of course odds, which is then tracked with the video as the race is run.
“ATG have enough information to fill over 50 different data fields if necessary, but a lot of this information is filtered out,” says Jens Thelander, Kanal 75’s technical manager.
“When we began, we had a strict specification for what we wanted to do and talked to many different companies over a two-year period - a lot of them said they could do it, but insisted on wanting to impose their own data structure. We didn’t want this, as we have got our own data structure.
“IBIS were quick to get to the root of the problem and implement the solution; they met our demands for functionality, budget and timescale”.
The application is based on the IBIS ClipLog, one of the developments for the Emmy award-winning Triage system at CNNSI which could grab full bandwidth clips using WinTV cards and a Quantel ClipBox and serve them up with the full metadata either for putting straight to air or for post-production.
Andrew Winter of IBIS says: “Triage gave us the knowledge of how to grab live highlight material in a server domain with all the metadata, so you reduce the amount of physical movement. When Granby Patrick of Marquis Broadcasting, the system integrators for Kanal 75 came to us, we were able to put together the IBIS package to handle ingest, metadata management and highlights production.
“I think it’s worked so well because we sent one of our top developers to sit with the people at Kanal 75 to find out exactly what they wanted to achieve and then we were able to use existing IBIS technology to meet their requirements. They have been very open to our suggestions to push the boundaries slightly and it’s been a really interesting process putting all this together”.
The application sits on a standard Windows pc with control lines to a to a Profile server and to matrix bringing in the video feeds via Pinnacle. It’s designed to allow one operator with a jog/shuttle to deal with two races at once. They can be both live or one live and one recorded. The GUI, designed in conjunction with Kanal 75 and Marquis is simple to operate; entering the date and race location pulls in all the metadata.
The operator can grab pictures of the horses in the paddock, using simple in-out commands, grab the line-up at the start, take a snapshot in the middle of the race, tracking an individual horse if necessary, and capture the end. All this can be sent straight to air as a highlight package, with a real time and a slo-mo end. There’s no extra post-production as there’s a series of macros for every race which tell the logging tool what to do, but the operator can override this if necessary.
As each clip is created it is exported to the IBIS ServerPlay database which writes the metadata to the mother clip; the packages are then fired to air. It’s proved to be a time and money-saver for Kanal 75, who were previously having to employ freelancers to come and put the packages together. There was a need for a very quick turn-around and no matter how fast they worked, they could not put a package together as quickly as the automated system can.
As well as being beamed in low res to the ATG website www.atg.se, some clips find their way on to TV4, Sweden's biggest commercial television operation during programmes like the sports slot Tips lordag.
The IBIS brief was to be able to produce instant highlights with minimum human intervention and maximum confidence. Jens Thelander thinks it does just that and citing future developments says: “We haven’t yet used its full potential and next year we will be expanding its Internet use on our Kanal 75 website, replacing stills with moving pictures”.