Paris, France (September 22, 2023)—French media company Canal+ Group in Paris recently opened four 100-square-meter studios and associated television broadcast production rooms at its new Canal+ ONE headquarters in Issy-les-Moulineaux, a southwestern suburb of Paris.
Each of the four control rooms linked to the studios, which are used for live sports programming, houses an SSL System T S500 64-fader, 3.5-bay modular console with a compact 32-fader S300 surface available for redundancy.
The new production studios are based on a SMPTE ST 2110 IP infrastructure. “We’ve built a Dante bubble for all the SSL machines,” says Jean-Marc Delage, project technical executive at Canal+. “Then we’ve got gateways that are making the transformation from Dante to ST 2110.” Each of the four production rooms typically handles 16 inputs and eight outputs, Delage says, and there are also 64 shared channels of wireless microphones on the Dante audio network.
System T gives the operators autonomy, Delage says. “Any operator can pick any source anywhere in the system without any help from network or maintenance people. And you can pick up any buses of any of the machines anywhere in the system. It’s fluid, simple and directly accessible on the console. So that was a big part of the decision.”
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For redundancy, every System T in the new rooms has been installed with a single dedicated SSL Tempest Engine, Delage reports. “We like to make things simple, so if anything goes wrong with the main system you click on the backup button and ask the EVS Cerebrum control system to switch systems and you go to the backup system.”
The Canal+ engineering team has implemented a data center structure where each production room is a terminal. “We’re really working on resilience,” says head of technical studies and architecture, Pierre Maillat. “Everything in the building is designed in such a way that you can have a shutdown of more than 50 percent of the system and it keeps running. So today, we have very strong reliability and very strong command of the redundancy of the system.”
As Maillat also notes, only a handful of network connections are necessary to handle all the audio in and out of a System T, offering significant savings in time, labor and equipment during installation or when relocating facilities.
The new ONE installation is the latest project in a long, ongoing business relationship between Canal+ and SSL. Since 2009, Canal+ has purchased 29 SSL mixing consoles, initially installing 13 C100 and C10 consoles as the broadcaster switched from analog to digital audio operation. In 2016, Canal+ began to make the transition to an all-IP infrastructure and has since taken delivery of 12 System T consoles along with two SSL Live desks. Canal+ very recently took delivery of two more System T platforms for a new facility and is now constructing two television studios in yet another building to consolidate news operations for its CNEWS channel.
