Written by Ronny Courtens Published: 15 November 2017

Category: Articles

Evergreen BlogReading time: 01:49

In this presentation from FCPX World at IBC, Christian Petterson from VGTV Norway explains why they exclusively use Final Cut Pro X to produce hundreds of hours of content each year for different online and linear television channels, including a 24/7 news channel.

But first some background information:

VG, owned by the Norwegian media conglomerate Schibsted Media Group, is a Norwegian newspaper with approximately 500 employees. In 1995 VG started its online news site. With more than 2.4 million daily unique visitors it is by far the largest website in Norway (Norway’s population is 5.3 million).

In 2007 VGTV was started as an online TV platform, and in 2014 they added their own 24/7 linear TV channel. Today, VGTV has approximately 70 full-time employees divided into News, Sports, Documentary and Program/Episodic departments.

As of January 2017, VG and Discovery have editorial cooperation on the rights of Norwegian football for the period 2017-2022. This means that VG / VGTV also produces the ongoing sports news for Eurosport, the pan-European broadcast sports channel.

Producing these vast amounts of content for many different media platforms on a daily basis requires a very streamlined operation. Switching completely from classic FCP to Final Cut Pro X in 2013 has allowed VGTV to drastically improve their production workflows, and they are extremely happy with this choice. They even provide in-house FCP X training for their staff.

Their entire production pipeline, from ingest over editing to playout, is handled by no less than seven powerful LumaForge media servers, connecting all the departments with their custom-made MAM.

During his presentation, Christian clearly demonstrated why Final Cut Pro X is the ideal solution for their operations. He explained how using Video Roles enables them to quickly export different versions of their programs for different online and linear tv platforms without needing to create duplicate timelines.

He also demonstrated how the powerful metadata features in FCP X allow for a seamless transfer of all the program metadata to their MAM without needing to create a program XML, how they deal with interlaced media, how they conform with the Loudness specifications for different platforms, etc...

In short, this is a video that you don’t want to miss: 

© 2017 Ronny Courtens/FCP.CO

Written by Ronny Courtens

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Ronny Courtens (Belgium) is a post-production professional with over 40 years of experience in the film and television industry. He has worked for major national broadcasters and post-production facilities as an editor, post supervisor, and workflow architect.

Since he successfully used Final Cut Pro on a complex broadcast job at the 2012 Olympic Games, he has helped media companies and broadcasters all over Europe to adopt this application.

Building on his experience in enterprise workflows, he joined Other World Computing in 2020 as Head of Enterprise Solutions (ESG), developing the Jellyfish, Jupiter, Argest and Neptune product lines.