The UAE broadcaster is in the midst of an upgrade to its facilities

Abu Dhabi broadcast services company LIVE has taken onboard five of Lawo’s V-pro8 “toolbox” broadcast processors as part of an ongoing modernisation of its facilities.

LIVE provides OB services for Abu Dhabi Media, which operates and manages 25 brands across multiple platforms, including broadcast, publishing and digital. The company claims to have the largest fleet of HD OB Vans in the MENA region, in addition to its large inventory of SNG equipment and 3000-square-meters of studio space.

The company’s MCR feed recordings and playout services currently provide 24/7 broadcast for 14 channels, and ingest and archive services include the management of Abu Dhabi’s largest historical film archive. The company’s post facilities include 20 AVID and FCP suites.

LIVE presently uses several Lawo audio consoles and VSM control systems in its OB Vans. The addition of the V_pro8 units, should provide greater workflow flexibility through the V_pro8’s ability to combine audio and video management functions.

V_pro8 features two-channel high quality up/down/cross format conversion, eight channel color correction, frame sync, separate video and audio delay, embedding and de-embedding with sample rate converters, 8×8 video matrix, 384×384 audio matrix, time code insertion, test pattern generation, surround down mix stages, quad- split multiviewer plus lots of additional helpers like thumbnail previews, waveform monitor, vector scope, peak metering display. High density audio connections, including MADI and RAVENNA, provide video-to-audio bridges within the studio infrastructure while a GUI based on HTML5 facilitates operation and monitoring.

Hamad Abdelrazaq, head of broadcast engineering at LIVE said: “As a service provider for very different applications, we have to offer our clients the most flexible but also most cost-efficient solutions. The V_pro8’s are the perfect tool for this, streamlining our workflows, and giving us the flexibility to work in different production situations quickly and reliably.”