Van Cliburn International Piano Competition Uses Blackmagic Design
Prestigious event employs Blackmagic Cloud and Blackmagic Ethernet Switch 360P for 21 day broadcast.
Blackmagic Design today announced that the 2025 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, a 21 day classical music event, was produced with a live production workflow featuring Blackmagic Cloud, as well as Blackmagic Cloud Store 20TB and Blackmagic Cloud Store Max 48TB network storage solutions. One of the world’s largest and most prestigious classical music competitions, the event was live streamed to YouTube in 4K HDR, delivering more than 130 hours of coverage over three weeks and drawing tens of millions of views globally.
St. Louis based production company Front Row, working in collaboration with Framework Productions, was behind the broadcast, with CEO Brenton Henry noting that one of the main goals was to use five HyperDeck Studio 4K Pro broadcast decks within a 2110 compatible workflow, recording directly to a Blackmagic Cloud Store 20TB and enabling point to point remote offloading to the post facility with Blackmagic Cloud Store Max 48TB.
“We used a Blackmagic Ethernet Switch 360P at the post facility,” Henry stated. “We had seven or eight different editing stations all working off the same Cloud Store, and the Ethernet Switch 360P helped tremendously with ‘air traffic control’ for that.”
“Media management has always been a massive challenge for us, especially for this event specifically because the deliverables are so big and the pace of the show is enormous,” he added. “Each competition gets a little bigger, and along with our producing partner Framework Productions, we try to push the envelope a little bit more each time. Between 2017 and 2022, we solved some workflow problems, but we also upgraded to 4K, doubling the data rates and creating a new challenge because storage is very expensive.”
To address this, Henry set up the Dropbox deliverables for media outlets and various distribution destinations, including “The Cliburn” YouTube channel, local television stations, Chinese distribution partners, and Medici, the largest classical music destination in Europe. “We ran Blackmagic Cloud for our ProRes files and our high resolution ISOs and had those live syncing to our backup facility. The smaller deliverables were also live syncing from Dropbox. We had nine 45 minute shows, plus 2.5 hour line cuts, ISOs, etc. To end a show with everything on the hard disk, one backup already made, and immediately be able to flip a switch was unbelievable. I was stunned at how quickly it all came together and worked the way that we had envisioned it,” he explained.
Henry also noted the products’ flexibility and how they helped to further streamline the process by optimizing how the team’s workload was allocated. “From a disaster recovery perspective, everything was immediately in the cloud and backed up, making our media manager’s job so much easier because he could start organizing everything and focus on other tasks instead of spending hours copying files,” he said. “Even things like the remote trigger options for the HyperDeck Studio 4K Pros were super helpful because that gave us a ton of flexibility on who triggered recordings. With so many deliverables, it was helpful to be able to assign assistant editors for general recordings, while our live content producer handled individual repertoire recordings since she worked directly with our hosts who knew the exact start and end points for each piece.”
Further supporting the workflow was a flypack built around Blackmagic Design’s ATEM 4 M/E Broadcast Studio 4K live production switcher, ATEM 2 M/E Advanced Panel, UltraStudio 4K Mini capture and playback devices for on air graphics, Teranex AV for standards conversion, HyperDeck HD Mini and HyperDeck 8K Extreme HDR broadcast decks paired with HyperDeck Extreme Control, SmartView 4K and SmartView Duo monitors, Blackmagic MultiDock 10G disk dock, Blackmagic Smart Videohub 12G 40×40 router, and a Videohub Smart Control Pro router to display individual angles on a large monitor for robo operation.
Framework Productions is also producing a feature length documentary on the competition, using the Blackmagic Cloud Pod network storage solution and Blackmagic Cloud Store 48TB to support 10G editing, and blending a real time broadcast infrastructure with cinematic post production. “With the film material ingested as it was shot and at the speed of transfer that the workflow provided, the team could begin editing work immediately,” Henry commented.
“I walked away from the show feeling like I never want to do a show without Blackmagic Cloud ever again,” Henry concluded. “It was unbelievable. The Cloud Store saved us constantly. If I had to choose one piece of gear to bring to a desert island, it would be this.”
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