Alfacam Takes up a New Technological Challenge
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Production facilities at the venues
HBS and Grass Valley Group assigned 45% of the “Host Feeds” production of the WC 2010 to Alfacam. HBS is the production company carrying the responsibility, by order of FIFA, to ensure that all the TV recordings are perfect. Grass Valley Group is providing cameras and other TV equipment. Therefore Alfacam will not deploy HD OBVans, but four customized fixed settings, built in a container village at each venue. Those were developed last year by the engineering team of Alfacam, in collaboration with HBS and GVG for the Confederations Cup. Besides that there will also be 90 extra cameras and 120 technicians.
The matches of the World Championships are taking place in ten different venues, spread over the whole territory of South Africa. The distance between the different locations is too long and thus there’s not enough time to build up and break down all the television infrastructures each time, neither to move them.
On request of and in collaboration with HBS and GVG, Alfacam developed another way of working and for this World Cup it deploys production structures that will be installed in specially designed containers forming the ‘technical villages’. They offer 300m² of space for nearly 100 operators.
The other six production villages were assigned to production companies from England, France, Germany and Spain.
HD OBVans for ARD/ZDF and TV Asahi
Alfacam will provide unilateral signals specifically for the German public broadcasting companies ARD-ZDF and the Japanese consortium around TV Asahi, with eight TV vans, 80 cameras and about 35 top technicians.
Gabriel Fehervari, CEO Alfacam: “Thanks to our technology from Lint, the football matches can be seen in billions of living rooms worldwide. We are in charge of the “world feed” or the “main feed” of the matches in Durban, Port Elizabeth, Johannesburg (Ellis Park) and Pretoria.”
"Large broadcasting companies want to add own recordings of their commentator or studio. It concerns “unilateral” recordings, which Alfacam provides among others to ARD and ZDF. For the Germans, five vans will record all the interviews, reports and reviews from the venues. A sixth van will be deployed for ARD at the hotel where the German Team is staying. Two other vans will be deployed for the Japanese television.”
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Summary of Alfacam’s support for the World Cup
• 155 technicians
• 170 cameras
• 8 HD OBVans
• 15 tons of equipment were flown-in
• 3 containers of equipment were shipped to South Africa
• 65.000 meters of audio and video cables were installed
• 5.000 meters of power cable were layed out with875 power plugs and 280 power supplies
Alfacam's involvment in Africa goes beyond the World Cup
The settlement of Alfacam in Johannesburg since 2009 also played an important role: “Alfacam Africa Facilities” is busy with jobs in tennis, horse riding, rugby, football and cricket, for different South African broadcasting companies, such as M-NET, the main commercial broadcasting company in South Africa.
Prior to that Alfacam already received the following assignments on the African continent: the FIFA -17 World Cup in Nigeria (November 2009), Coupe Africaine des Nations (in 2004 in Tunis and in 2008 in Ghana we did nearly all the matches), World Championship Judo (Egypt, 2005), WC Handball (Tunisia, 2005), concerts in Egypt (by the pyramids of Gizeh, 2007) and Morocco (Jean Michel Jarre in the Moroccan Sahara), etc.”