How RTVE brought the San Sebastián Film Festival to life in real time with LucidLink

Meet RTVE: Spain’s national broadcaster 

RTVE (Radiotelevisión Española) is Spain's largest state-owned public media company. The broadcaster comprises TVE, home to seven television channels, RNE with six radio stations, the RTVE.es website and the RTVE Play platform.

Capturing the magic of San Sebastián Film Festival 

Every year, RTVE joins crowds of film fans in Spain’s Basque Country to cover the prestigious San Sebastián International Film Festival. 

Capturing all the magic from this cinematic celebration is a heavy production lift. To showcase the best footage to festival attendees and TV audiences, RTVE deploys both local and off-site teams, including mobile units, photographers, post-production stations and live broadcasting.

The challenge: collaborate on festival content faster

In the past, RTVE’s complex festival production set up led to logistical and technical hurdles which delayed content turnaround. With teams spread across multiple locations, there was no single place to quickly share, access and edit content, which led to longer delivery times. 

Following a recommendation from their partners at Compaas Media, RTVE turned to LucidLink to bring its San Sebastián International Film Festival content to life faster.

The solution: share and access content instantly in the cloud

With LucidLink, RTVE could ingest and upload all festival content in real time to a secure cloud-based shared filespace. 

By making all the festival media — including raw, project, sequences and renders — instantly accessible in LucidLink, RTVE’s teams started collaborating on content the moment it was shared. 

LucidLink’s storage collaboration platform also brought an end to editors waiting for files to download or sync, empowering RTVE to edit and produce festival content even faster.

Making real-time editing a reality

LucidLink brought all festival footage together into a single shared filespace, making content instantly accessible across the team. This included footage from XDCAM discs, SXS/P2 cards used by ENG reporters and Madrid's central RTVE media archive. 

RTVE also deployed five Avid Media Composer editing stations at the Kursaal Congress Center, combined with three at the RTVE Broadcast Center in San Sebastián. All footage was instantly available to the relevant teams on LucidLink, helping to make real-time editing a reality.

High-quality content, without compromise

RTVE’s new cloud-based workflow dismantled traditional barriers to collaborative editing. 

With no need to compress images using LucidLink, multiple teams could work seamlessly on high-resolution content, all without compromising on quality. 

Mobile units equipped with fiber connectivity then streamed freshly edited high-resolution pieces in real time to EVS XFile servers. From there, content was transferred to the local record train of the EVS XT servers, ready for immediate playback. This timely, high-quality content wowed audiences at both the Kursaal galas and live broadcasts at San Sebastián City Hall. 

Rapid team collaboration across locations

Best of all, RTVE’s team could easily collaborate on festival content from wherever they were working. 

Teams in the broadcaster’s headquarters in Torrespaña and Prado del Rey had access to media on the shared filespace at any time. From here, workers seamlessly supported archiving and additional edits in the central editing systems. 

Meanwhile, editors in Madrid could effortlessly upload content from various sources directly to the cloud, making it immediately available to editors in the Basque Country. By connecting teams across geographies, RTVE produced high-quality content, faster.

The results: fast, secure and collaborative media production

The introduction of LucidLink made RTVE’s film festival content workflow more efficient, secure and collaborative — right from capture to archive. 

• Faster and more efficient: teams turned content around double quick. With no waiting around for physical uploads, time-consuming data transfers or file syncing, real-time editing became a reality. 

• Collaborative freedom: RTVE's teams worked together seamlessly from multiple locations. During peak times, 15 dispersed RTVE colleagues worked on content in real time using LucidLink. This not only boosted collaboration, but gave employees flexibility and freedom, while reducing travel and infrastructure costs. 

• Total security: LucidLink’s zero-knowledge model and centralized user management meant RTVE’s data remained private, no matter where their teams worked from. 

Magical media production workflows. Just add LucidLink.

RTVE’s success at the San Sebastián Festival showed what’s possible when you add the right cloud technology into media production workflows. 

By centralizing and sharing content instantly on LucidLink, RTVE’s teams took their productivity to another level. Editors could get to work immediately and collaborate with ease, no matter where they were located. 

The end result? Top-notch coverage, delivered to delighted film fans faster. 

Ready to bring real-time collaboration to your media workflows? Start your free trial here.