MMC Studios is the leading television and film studio provider in Germany. Its studios are responsible for some of Europe’s most popular programmes, including live shows like Let’s Dance (the German version of Dancing with the Stars/Strictly Come Dancing), The Masked Singer and The X Factor. The studios are fully equipped for 4k HDR Ultra HD production.

“On a show like Let’s Dance, we produce in HDR Ultra HD, and deliver that and a SDR HD version to CBC, RTL’s broadcast centre,” said Andreas Albert, head of technical operations at MMC Studios. “The show can have as many as 20 or 30 HD/4k and colour space conversions in production, as well as the final output, and with different latencies in different converters, we have to work hard to keep everything in synchronisation.”

The solution is to use Hitomi MatchBox to align every stage of the process. MatchBox Glass, the iPhone app version of the signal generator, is used on every camera into the switcher. A MatchBox Generator provides test signals for video processing chains, and the MatchBox Analyser provides absolute precision in measurement of lip sync, phase coherence and channel identification. Both the generator and analyser are 4k ready with 12G-SDI connectivity.

The unique Hitomi test sequence tests every element of the circuit, and the Analyser calculates the difference between what it knows should be there and what it actually receives. For MMC, this means that every delay in every part of the production chain is precisely calibrated and can be calculated. When the signals leave the building on a live broadcast, they are precisely in sync.