How Blackmagic Cloud Powered 130 Hours of Live Coverage at the Van Cliburn Competition

The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition is one of the most prestigious classical music events in the world. Held every four years in Fort Worth, Texas, the 21-day competition draws tens of millions of viewers globally. For the 2025 edition, Front Row — working alongside Framework Productions — delivered more than 130 hours of multicamera 4K HDR coverage, live-streamed to YouTube and backed by a cloud-first production workflow built on Blackmagic Design infrastructure.

The Challenge

Classical music production demands precision. Every keystroke, every dynamic shift, every subtle expression matters. For the Cliburn, this meant capturing performances across two venues — Van Cliburn Concert Hall at Texas Christian University for preliminary and quarterfinal rounds, and Bass Performance Hall for the finals — while maintaining broadcast-quality output across three weeks of continuous coverage.

Between recent competitions, we upgraded our entire pipeline to 4K, doubling data rates and creating new challenges for storage, networking, and redundancy. The question wasn't whether we could capture the content — it was whether we could manage the volume without compromising quality or reliability.

Cloud-First Workflow

The backbone of our production was Blackmagic Cloud. We deployed five HyperDeck Studio 4K Pro broadcast decks within a 2110-compatible workflow, recording directly to a Blackmagic Cloud Store 20TB. This enabled point-to-point remote offloading to our post facility using Blackmagic Cloud Store Max 48TB — meaning everything was immediately in the cloud and backed up.

"By leveraging Blackmagic Cloud, everything was immediately in the cloud and backed up, making our media manager's job so much easier."

— Brenton Henry, CEO of Front Row

We ran Blackmagic Cloud for ProRes files and high-resolution ISOs with live syncing to a backup facility. Across the competition, this covered nine 45-minute shows plus 2.5-hour line cuts per round — a staggering volume of broadcast-grade content flowing through the pipeline simultaneously.

The Production Stack

The workflow was built around a flypack featuring Blackmagic Design's ATEM 4 M/E Broadcast Studio 4K live production switcher and an ATEM 2 M/E Advanced Panel. Supporting the core switching infrastructure:

At the post facility, a Blackmagic Ethernet Switch 360P ensured seamless performance across seven to eight simultaneous editing stations, all accessing the same shared storage. This level of concurrent access — with no bottlenecks — was critical for a production of this scale.

Beyond Broadcast

Framework Productions is also producing a feature-length documentary on the competition, using Blackmagic Cloud Pod and Cloud Store 48TB to support 10G editing workflows. The same infrastructure that powered our live broadcast seamlessly transitioned to support long-form post-production — showing the flexibility of the cloud-based approach.

The Van Cliburn competition represents what's possible when cloud-native production workflows meet world-class live events. The result: 130+ hours of broadcast-quality content, delivered live to a global audience of tens of millions, with every frame preserved in 4K HDR.