Dell & Fader Fort Stream 4K at SXSW

April 2015 – At NAB 2015 Dell was showing the configuration and hardware that was used to stream the main stage at SXSW live in 4K in conjunction with Fader Fort. The solution was developed by the Dell Precision team and acted as the compute, editing, encode, transcode and playout control for the live 4K stream. The stream was being sent to local Dell 4K displays as well as being pushed to the internet at TheFader.com .

Dell & Fader Fort 4K Live Streaming Workflow for SXSW 2015

The live feed was being captured by 4 RED Epic and Scarlet cameras with 4K broadcast modules. The signal from the stage was a SMPTE compliant fiber run to a fiber base station. The fiber is connected to a Blackmagic Design ATEM switch which feeds a 4K recorder, local 4K screens the encoding and streaming creation and an AJA IO 4K system for the ATEM control, video editing and interstitial playback.

Dell brought their high reliability solutions to the project for the processing horsepower and the storage subsystem. The back end of the 4K recorder was a JBOD box in their rack with redundant power supplies and NICs so the data was safely captured in the field.

For the Encode and Streaming function they used a redundant set of Dell Precision Tower 7810 workstations. These workstations managed the direct connection to the web for the 4K streams, and supported the HEVC encode in software on the machine. For higher count camera arrangements and for multiple outputs, this configuration is scalable through the use of additional rack mount servers in the 7000 series. The Dell Precision Tower 7810 workstations were also used for the standalone editing and editorial station which was connected to the Adobe Premier Pro Creative Cloud for graphic embellishment and titling. These units had external large format Dell 4K displays.

Near the switching equipment the ATEM control & video editing was done on a pair of Dell Precision M3800 mobile workstations that were also connected to the Adobe Premier Pro Creative Cloud. These workstations support 4K viewing.

The tower units and the rack units can support a larger group of editors and data streams through virtualization. The systems support both CPU and GPU virtualization with VMware and Citrix. These support both HD and UHD processing in the virtual space as well as pushing the 4K pixels to the displays at the user endpoint. These systems are also scalable to traditional tiered storage banks with Flash CACHE, SSD, HDD and Tape subsystems on the back end of the flow.