Tennis - Cycling - Confed Cup - and Sochi on the Horizon

TVM OB8

Since its establishment in 1986 by Bart and Helen Arnold, TVM has built up a reputation as a leading Outside Broadcasting Facilities Company. Our ability to seek out and implement the latest technological developments has set us apart from other operators in the industry. This, along with our policy of sourcing the most talented and skilled operators available has ensured that the quality of the service offered by TVM is always at the highest possible standard of good industry practice. TVM has a proven track record as a first class, reliable outside broadcast facilities provider. We have vast experience of all types of outside broadcasts, and fully understand the intricacies and practicalities of OB facilities throughout Ireland. Therefore we can provide everything from accreditation to satellite paths and catering on site to the most complex technical requirements.

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HD Resources HDR4

HD Resources designs and manufactures OB Vans for sale and rental. HDR's products represent the utmost in both quality and design in the areas of HD production. Every HD Resources production benefits from the deep experience and expertise the team has gained from sports, music, and entertainment productions the world over. HD Resources has several 20 seat, 24 camera, High Definition units available for hire. The ”Product” is optimised for sport, music or entertainment productions. The units contain the very latest technology, installed and ready to use. The fact that HD Resources has both engineers and producers on staff means that it can provide all types of technology and production services to meet specific customer needs. The OB units provide: Built in storage - True 5.1 mixing area - 2nd production - High-end design and quality.

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Euro Media Group Strengthens its Capacities

Euro Media Group announced the acquisition of technical resources from Alfacam. With this strategic acquisition, Euro Media Group, already well-established in Europe and Belgium, is reinforcing its presence and is uniquely positioned at worldwide level, notably in wireless technologies & services (RF) which are critical for major events. Thierry Drilhon, C.E.O. of Euro Media Group, states: “Since its creation, Euro Media Group has contributed to accelerate the market consolidation in order to provide broadcasters and producers with more and more technology, innovation and expertise. The acquisition of these technical resources will contribute to support our long-term growth”.

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Four New HD OB Supertrucks from Gearhouse Broadcast

Gearhouse Broadcast has commissioned four new 30-camera HD OB supertrucks, two of which are delivered and in operation. The trucks, named HD5, HD6, HD7 and HD8 represent a multi-million dollar investment by the company. Gearhouse Australia Sales and Marketing Director, Manny Papas, says the new trucks are very much in keeping with Gearhouse’s global philosophy, adding, “Gearhouse Broadcast’s owner John Newton recently relocated to Australia and his edict has always been quality and presentation are paramount. Anyone who sees these trucks will also see that edict has been followed to the letter.” Four new trucks is a big investment by any company’s standards in today’s challenging marketplace, but Gearhouse has experienced significant year on year growth, which, according to Papas, was the driving force behind their commissioning.

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Mediatec Equips Its Entire OB Fleet With Riedel MediorNet

Riedel Communications announced that the Swedish broadcast production provider Mediatec has based its full mobile production fleet on a Riedel MediorNet infrastructure. A total of 20 MediorNet Compact PRO and eight MediorNet Modular systems are installed across 10 Mediatec OB vans. "We believe that the future of mobile production lies within flexible setup scenarios that can be adapted to specific applications as needed," said Paul Henriksen, CEO at Mediatec. "Based on Riedel's MediorNet, this new approach not only offers us more flexibility, but also helps us to cut unnecessary costs in installation, production, and maintenance."

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Red TX Helps Chime For Change Reach Out To The World

Broadcast audio specialists Red TX played a vital role in ensuring that the Sound of Change Live concert at London’s Twickenham Stadium was successfully broadcast to more than 150 countries around the world. Billed as a feminist Live Aid, Sound of Change Live was a focal point for the Chime for Change campaign, which aims to improve education, health and justice for women around the world. The campaign was founded by Gucci's designer Frida Giannini, Beyoncé and Salma Hayek and Saturday’s concert raised over £2.6 million to fund approximately 200 projects in 70 countries. It also provided a great day out for more than 50,000 people who flocked to Twickenham Stadium to watch Beyoncé, Rita Ora, Jessie J, Haim, Ellie Goulding, Jennifer Lopez and Florence and the Machine take to the stage to champion the cause. Even Jay-Z put in an appearance, performing Crazy in Love with his wife, Beyoncé.

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The John Lennon Educational Tour Bus Takes AJA Gear on the Road in the U.S. and Europe

Non-profit group The John Lennon Educational Tour Bus has provided American students of all ages with free, hands-on opportunities to make original music, video, photo, game app and broadcast projects for the past 16 years via a mobile studio-in-a-bus that has been on the road since 1998. Featuring state-of-the-art audio and HD video recording, the bus has visited schools, colleges, concerts, festivals, trade shows and museums in big cities, small towns, rural areas, severely underserved communities and everything in between. On May 8th, 2013, Yoko Ono Lennon debuted the new Lennon Bus Europe in Liverpool, set to kick off its inaugural tour in London in June and continue with travels across the UK and Europe.

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HD OBVan Directory 2013

The 2013 Directory will feature about 40 new HD trucks from all around the world: China, South Korea, New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, Qatar, Cyprus, United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Serbia, Gelgium and Germany. In addition to detailed listings of the installed equipment we will show the various working areas inside the truck as well as views of the monitor walls and the floor plan. You also will find a review on the FIFA Confederations Cup and a preview on the FIFA World Cup. We also will introduce the ANO Panorama OB fleet which will broadcast the Sochi Olympic Games to the Russian audience and report about the ongoing DTM race events accross Europe. A case study about the Al Jazeera sports channel beINSport will also be included in this year's directory.

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Shine Germany Produces the Game Show "Don't Lose the Money"

"Don’t Lose the Money" was developed by Meter Television (Shine Group) and was produced in the MMC studios in Cologne, by Shine Germany on behalf of FOX. Mark Achterberg directed the show pilot. A total of 14 cameras were used for the HD-production at MMC studio 32. These included five Grass Valley (GVG) LDK 8000s, one GVG LDK 8300 Super SloMo camera, one GVG LDK 8000 camera on a SuperTechno 50 crane, one GVG LDK 8000 elite wireless handheld camera, and a GVG LDK 8000 elite wireless Steadicam. For special camera settings (helmet camera etc.), four of GOPRO’s HD Hero cameras and a Toshiba IK-HD1 lipstick camera were used. The video signals were mixed on a GVG Kayenne XL (3.5 M/E) at MMC’s HD control room 11. The playbacks were carried out via three channels on a Grass Valley Summit Server. One EVS XT2 was used for the highlight editing and the Super SloMo. For the recording, 16 Sony XDCAM VTRs were available.

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Autoscript, Camera Corps and TCS Go On Air at The Degree Show

Founded in 1962, Ravensbourne is a university sector college in the field of digital media and design, with a vocationally focused portfolio of courses spanning fashion, television and broadcasting, interactive product design, architecture and environment design, graphic design, animation, moving image, music production for media and sound design. Vinten has a long standing relationship with the college which chose a range of Vinten heads and pedestals to equip its state-of-the-art live HD studio when Ravensbourne moved to its new campus on the Greenwich peninsular. The site now features Vinten Quattro, Quartz and Osprey pedestals, as well as Vector 430 pan and tilt heads.

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Manhattan Center Studios Extends Its Riedel Intercom System

"We believe that the Riedel intercom is on another level from its competition, and with every software release, it becomes both more powerful and easier to program," said Marvin Williams, director of engineering and operations at Manhattan Center Studios. "There is no request a production or client can make that we cannot accommodate. Now that we are completely Riedel — Artist matrix and keypanels, Performer digital party lines, and Acrobat wireless — the whole system is a pleasure to use. Investing in Riedel is one of the best decisions we ever made." The Manhattan Center is known for hosting extraordinary performances and special events in which media and entertainment come together. With its unique location in the heart of midtown Manhattan, the facility is a premier mid-size venue for corporate galas, charity fundraisers, award shows, rock concerts, and fashion shows.

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Miranda Chosen to Outfit New IMG Studios Facility in London

IMG Studios, the studio and post production arm of IMG Sports Media, a division of IMG Worldwide, the global sports, fashion and media company, is currently outfitting a 107,000 square foot, ultra-modern facility to the west of London near Heathrow Airport. The new building will include four studios totaling 6000 square feet, 13 production galleries, 72 edit suites, four sound dubbing suites, five radio studios, five transmission suites and a master control room. Tying it all together are two Miranda NVISION 8500 Series routers, the first of which is an NVISION 8576 enterprise-class router for large facilities that will provide a 576x1152 matrix for all incoming and outgoing lines. A separate NVISION 8576 Plus enterprise-class router will anchor all routing for IMG Studios’ production galleries and studios via an 1152x1152 matrix.

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Roland Garros 2013: EVS at the Heart of the Broadcast Facilities

This Year we had a closer look onto Roland Garros where the tournament took place between 21 May and 09 June and was broadcasted by 76 TV channels worldwide. The world feed was produced by France Television (cameras at the courts) and Input Media (video galleries and server farms). The Tennis Channel, ESPN and NBC had set up its own production facilities to produce unilateral signals relaying on support from Presteigne Charter. On the largest court, Philippe Chatrier, France Television’s (FTV) 14-camera operation saw all content ingested into four EVS XT servers, configured 4-in, 2-out. The second largest court, Suzanne Lenglen, content from nine cameras was ingested to three servers. From approximately 50 discrete feeds delivered to the MCR, 15 independent feeds were fed into the EVS servers.

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Giro d' Italia 2013

For broadcast production of the Giro D’Italia, two RAI OB vans ( “Rome Unit 7” and “Unit Milan” ) where deployed: one to take care of the production process for RAI Sport; the other for the international HD worldfeed viewed in 173 nations. A world premiere at this year’s Giro was the fact that all wireless links where delivered by the Belgium company Eurolinx , a 100% Alfacam Group company. Alfacam/Eurolinx - at the moment in a full re-organization and takeover, delivered 8 motorbikes – 3 helicopters – 1 Beachcraft KingAir airplane ‘B200’ and a reception base with auto tracking antenna – controlled by GPS and a total of 20 RF and productional crew. 4 TV HD motorbikes ( BMWs )  in addition a fifth RF motorbike for ENG shooting and extra contributions to any news reports was in course feed directly via the fixed wing B200 relay airplane into the media servers for content and play outs, while two Cineflex V-14 cameras where installed on 2 helicopters – type Eurocopter AS355 to guarantee top and high altitude beauty shots.

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The Sochi 2014 Organizing Committee Unveils Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games Medals
The Sochi 2014 Olympic and Paralympic medals are unique and feature the Sochi 2014 "Patchwork Quilt" – a mosaic of national designs from the various cultures and ethnicities of the Russian Federation. The medals have been carefully crafted to depict the landscape of Sochi from the sun's rays reflecting through the snowy mountain tops onto the sandy beaches of the Black Sea coast. These contrasts in Russia's natural landscape are embodied in the medals and will be an everlasting souvenir for the champions. The unusual combination of metal and polycarbonate lends to the medals a sense of lightness and distinctive beauty. The front of the medal features the Olympic rings. The reverse contains the name of the competition in English, and the logo of the Sochi 2014 Games. The official name of the Games in Russian, English and French is engraved on the medal’s rim.

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One Direction Global Tour Uses Blackmagic Design’s ATEM for Live Switching

Audiotech Services Ltd is supplying One Directions 120 date ‘Take Me Home’ Tour with an AV control system built around Blackmagic Design infrastructure, including the Blackmagic Design ATEM 2 M/E Production Switcher with ATEM 2 M/E Broadcast Panel, Broadcast Videohub router and SmartView Duo monitor. The concert tour consists of 120 shows in Australasia, Asia, Europe and North America, which broke records by selling more than 300,000 tickets in a single day, and includes a huge amount of video at each show. All of this is managed through a rack mounted AV control system supplied by Audiotech, providing full HD monitoring and recording, eight live camera inputs, stills playback and live HD web streaming.

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Tom Kenny Gets To The Pointe with Robe at MTV Upfronts

International Lighting Designer Tom Kenny specified Robe’s latest Pointe moving lights for the 2013 MTV Upfront presentation, staged at the Beacon Theatre in New York City. The annual network Upfront event  - announcing  upcoming programming releases and strategies for the next year - featured incendiary musical performances by a host of international superstars like Selena Gomez and Emeli Sande, with a special guest performance by Snoop Lion (formerly known as Snoop Dogg).  It was hosted by MTV personalities Sway Calloway, Nikki Glaser and Sara Schaefer. The Robe moving lights – which also included a plethora of Robe ROBIN 600 LEDWashes – which are among Kenny’s current favorite wash fixtures, were supplied by rental company VER, which has a wide range of Robe moving heads at its disposal.

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Clay Paky Lights Up Coachella for Red Hot Chili Peppers

Lighting designer Scott Holthaus had 70 Clay Paky Sharpys and 23 Clay Paky Alpha Beam 1500s in his inventory for the Chili Peppers’ nighttime shows on both festival weekends.  “The Sharpys were on moving pods on the stage while the 1500s were on top of my vertical towers, on the floors and screamers; eight 1500s were front of house,” he explains. Holthaus recounts how “one show was nearly cancelled due to a sandstorm.  There were sand dunes on the stage.  Our video portion and many of the fixtures were disabled.  All I had was Sharpys and Alphas.”  With so many particulates in the air Holthaus wanted fixtures “that throw a beam as far as possible.  The 1500 throws telephone poles way deep into the crowd – huge telescopic beams that are good to the last seat.  No one I know had seen beams like that before – they looked like Star Wars light sabers!”

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PRG Supplies Stellar Support for Chime for Change Superstar Line Up

Dubbed a 'feminist Live Aid', the production was incredibly complex, featuring a 12 strong line up of big name stars and a 50,000-strong audience to campaign for improved education, health and justice for women around the world. In charge of the logistics and operations was production director Jim Baggott from promoter Harvey Goldsmith: "I immediately involved PRG because I knew this was going to be an extremely complex and time restricted set up. We needed a company we could rely on 100%. For something like this we would expect eight days to set up and rehearse - but PRG had just 4.5 days to build the stage and put in all the infrastructure before rehearsals, so it was tight!"

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NewTek Unveils Next-Generation TriCaster 40

“At NewTek, we are constantly striving to help people with ideas use video in new ways, so that they can tell stories and make a big impact when sharing them with the world,” said Dr. Andrew Cross, Chief Technology Officer at NewTek. “Our next-generation TriCaster 40 gives the most budget-conscious storytellers a whole new class of professional tools, which if purchased individually, would each cost far more than the TriCaster 40 itself. This means that financial limitations no longer hamper creative storytelling. Anyone can use TriCaster 40 to turn a live event into a video production that rivals the pristine look of a network broadcast.” With a broad range of new production capabilities, TriCaster 40 now enables video producers to create stunning HD television-style video broadcasts.

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DreamHack Summer 2013 Brought to you Live by Blackmagic Design

Organizers of DreamHack Summer 2013, the worlds largest digital festival and LAN eSports competition, are preparing to broadcast and stream more than 512 hours of HD programming with the help of Blackmagic Design’s ATEM Production Switcher range and Teranex 2D Processors. DreamHacks technical team will broadcast key moments on Swedish Television (SVT), twitch.tv and DreamHack TV and using eight purpose built flight pack solutions. The two largest are based around Blackmagic’s ATEM 2 M/E Production Switcher with ATEM 2 M/E Broadcast Panel and include a Compact Videohub router, ATEM Studio Converter, Teranex 2D Processor, HyperDeck Studio Pro SSD broadcast deck, SmartView Duo monitors and CasparCG with a DeckLink HD Extreme 4K capture and playback card. Organizers also switched the entire acquisition chain of the two largest productions to HD SDI camera’s.

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Sony Introduces the PMW-300

Sony announced its PMW-300 XDCAM camcorder, equipped with the 1/2-type Exmor™ Full-HD 3CMOS sensors capable of delivering incredible images even in low-light conditions. The PMW-300 is ideal for broadcast producers and corporate event camera operators who require a flexible semi-shoulder camcorder that can easily be adapted to suit a wide range of production environments. An evolution of Sony’s industry leading PMW-EX3, the PMW-300 is able to record 50Mbps HD material in MPEG HD422, meeting broadcast standards around the world, including the European Broadcasting Union’s (EBU) requirements on HD broadcast acquisition for long form programme making. The high bit rate ensures excellent capture of fast moving objects, while its chroma subsampling feature is perfect for a wide range of video encoding areas such as VFX and green screen applications. The camcorder can also be upgraded in the future to support Sony’s revolutionary XAVC codec, extending the lifecycle of the product to ensure maximum return on investment.

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4K Testing at FIFA Confederations Cup 2013

A decision on whether the 2014 FIFA World Cup will be shot and offered in 4K Ultra HD is expected to be made in the coming weeks, following a test that will be conducted during FIFA's Confederations Cup, which currently is taking place in Brazil. Brazil is the host nation of the World Cup, and the test will allow FIFA and broadcast sponsor Sony to experiment in an actual World Cup venue during a major soccer tournament. “By showing we can do it live, broadcasters will become confident in a 4K World Cup. Then FIFA can make a decision,” said Mark Grinyer, Sony’s technical manager for the 2014 tournament. Should the 4K production move ahead, Ultra HD coverage of the World Cup would be available to broadcast rights holders with the capability to transmit 4K - though at this early stage there won't be many of them. Plans might also include distribution to digital cinemas capable of receiving the signal. “There is quite a lot of interest, but that would depend on the way FIFA decides to offer the rights,” Grinyer explained.

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ESPN to Close 3D Channel

The official statement from the company reads “Due to limited viewer adoption of 3D services to the home, ESPN is discontinuing ESPN 3D. We are committing our 3D resources to other products and services that will better serve fans and affiliates. Nobody knows more about sports in 3D than ESPN, and we will be ready to provide the service to fans if or when 3D does take off.” Basically, ESPN is leaving the door open to restarting the channel if the adoption rate grows more rapidly. ESPN says it will restart 3D transmissions “if or when 3D does take off”. But the decision is even more serious than just the ending of a channel because ESPN’s commitment to 3D meant that there were many important sporting events captured for the channel, and then made available – for a price – to broadcasters such as BSkyB, which seemingly remains enthusiastic about 3D.  ESPN produced about 140 events a year in 3D.

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FIFA Considering Dropping 3D Broadcast Plans for 2014 World Cup

In a major blow to 3D technology for television, world soccer governing body FIFA has said it is considering dropping plans to broadcast next year's soccer World Cup in 3D. FIFA's director of television, Niclas Ericson, made the announcement at a briefing in Brazil during the Confederations Cup, an international soccer competition considered a dress rehearsal for Brazil's hosting of the World Cup in 2014. Ericson said FIFA was looking again at 3D after ESPN announced earlier this week it would shut down its 3D sports channel, citing limited appeal for the format. "We know that the technology has had a few setbacks in recent days, if you refer to some of the statements by (ESPN)," Ericson said. "It's clear when a big sports broadcaster like ESPN makes an announcement like that it creates a lot of extra tension (for the technology)…We are still reviewing whether we should do 3D for the 2014 FIFA World Cup, the number of matches."

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