Tonmeistertagung in Cologne and Live Performances in South-Africa, Denmark and London

RTV Group Builds HD OBVan with Blackmagic Design

Privately owned, RTV Group encompasses the national radio brands 538, SLAM!FM and Radio10 Gold, along with a number of online digital radio stations and two television brands, 538 and SLAM!TV. To support all of these stations, RTV decided to build a single, flexible facility that will combine six on air radio studios, a live television studio and a single OB van. Currently under construction in Hilversum with the help of Dutch reseller Maarten Sound & Vision, the facility will allow RTV to combine broadcasting production and post production for both over the air and online radio and television content in SD and HD. At the heart of the system are two Blackmagic Design Universal Videohub 288s. The first will be responsible for handling video distribution over SDI and fiber over longer distances, while the second will provide complete redundancy and back up, ensuring uninterrupted transmission, critical in a 24/7 live environment.

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Wireless NAC Camera System from BSI

BSI introduced their wireless system for the NAC camera at IBC this year. The system retains the camera’s full capability and is deployed using the company’s RF infrastructure. At the heart of the system is BSI’s Dual Stream Mini Transmitter which provides the RF links for the live and playback video streams while a separate receiver provides the radio link for the remote camera control. BSI used their new wireless version of the NAC slow motion camera at the Chelsea Liverpool Premiership soccer game for Sky Sports on last Sunday. The wireless NAC system was used to cover the live action for 100% of the game, replacing the standard RF camera while simultaneously providing a live replay feature.

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ARRI ALEXA Fiber Remote Option Used for COLDPLAY Concert Film

ARRI’s new Fiber Remote Option for the ALEXA camera has passed the ultimate field test by being successfully integrated into extensive outdoor broadcast (OB) coverage of a spectacular Coldplay concert at the Stade de France in Paris. The footage forms part of a film titled COLDPLAY LIVE 2012, which will screen in cinemas worldwide for one night on November 13th before its Blu-Ray release on November 19th. The ALEXA Fiber Remote Option is a version of the ALEXA camera that has been adapted specifically for broadcast-style, multi-camera productions. Using a certified system that includes CopperHead from Telecast Fiber Systems, ALEXA and ALEXA Plus models can be connected through a SMPTE 311M fiber connection and remote controlled for live painting of the image. The system introduces ALEXA’s exceptional dynamic range, latitude, highlight and shadow details, color rendering, natural skin tones, high sensitivity and low noise to entirely new applications, allowing a significant increase in production value for a wide range of televised events.

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Al Jazeera Balkans News Studio

Al Jazeera Balkans (AJB) is a 24-hour international news television station headquartered in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The station broadcasts in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian six hours daily, with Al Jazeera English programmes broadcasting the remainder of the day. Al Jazeera Balkans is a sister channel of the Arabic language Al Jazeera and the English language channel Al Jazeera English. The station broadcasts news analysis and features as well as documentaries, live debates, current affairs, business, technology, and sports. The channel began broadcasting as Al Jazeera on 11 November 2011 and launched their website on that same day, its appearance mainly based on that of its English counterpart. It broadcasts from the Eutelsat W3C satellite and also has a live stream as both their Arabic and English counterparts do.

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Bayerischer Rundfunk Studio FM1

Bayerischer Rundfunk [Bavarian Broadcasting] (BR) is the public broadcasting authority for the German Freistaat (Republic) of Bavaria, with its main offices located in Munich. BR is a member of ARD. BR shares broadcasting with ARD for 1⁄5 of the day. BR operates a main broadcasting facility in Munich as well as studios in Freimann and Unterföhring. There are also regional TV and radio studios in Nuremberg ("Studio Franconia"), Würzburg ("Regional Studio Franconia/River Main") and Regensburg ("Regional Studio East Bavaria").

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Gazi TV Creates Vision with Ross

With the addition of two new HD studios, GTV required reliable switchers to meet the demands of everyday entertainment such as Bangla drama, talk shows, movies, documentaries, music and the latest news from Bangladesh and around the world. “GTV produces many types of shows and we needed a switcher that could meet those high expectations,” said Mr. A K Ferdaus Ahmed, Head of Broadcast & Engineering, Gazi Satellite Television.  “Ross’ Vision switchers offer the HD capabilities that we are looking for, a sleek modular design and high quality of outputs. From an operational perspective, Vision has proven easy to use plus our operators seem to thoroughly enjoy the Squeeze and Tease feature.  It operates just like a wipe with only a press of a button.”

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24 TV Turkey Studios Come to Life with Orad’s PowerWall Video Wall Technology

24 TV Turkey chose Orad’s on-air graphics and studio solutions to create two news studios. With Orad’s solutions, 24 TV can provide the illusion of a large studio environment where the presenter can use every square inch to present the news show. Following the vision of 24 TV Executive Editor and respected anchorman Mr. Yigit Bulut, its choice of a complex, multi-display LED wall-based design was an easy pick thanks to Orad's PowerWall enterprise broadcast graphic solution. Offering up to 16 video outputs and 16 video inputs within a single box, combined with a powerful graphics engine, 24 TV now offers immense visuals either wide or close-up, without any pixelization.

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HD Studio Directory 2012

In our HD Studio Special 2012 gives detailed presentations of 41 HD Studios from Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, Norway, Qatar, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom. Similar to our successful HD OBVan Directories we present each HD Studio on three pages including a technical synopsis with an overview on the installed hardware in the sections lighting, public address, cameras, lenses and pedestals, video gallery, audio gallery, intercom and the listing of the relevant system integrators. In addition to these straight forward presentations we have a dedicated focus on studio lighting, videowalls in studios and fast turnaround productions. Finally we focus on the production of the Eurovision Song Contest 2012 in Baku.

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Australia’s V8 Supercar Television Relies on EVS

As part of the International V8 Supercars Championship, production company V8 Supercar Television produced live coverage and highlights of the race with help from Global Television, a leading provider of outsourced television production services. The race was broadcast in 117 countries, with Seven Network holding the rights for live TV coverage in Australia. V8 Supercar Television deployed 16 EVS XT series HD servers in three OB vans for multi-cam recording, live and slow-motion replays, and highlights. According to Dan Flett, broadcast engineer, Global Television: “Large-scale productions such as the Bathurst 1000 are simply a large version of our smaller events. EVS systems scale very well with our production requirements so we don't have to learn new software or workflows when we ‘go large’. We add more devices and it just works. In the live production realm there’s an expectation these days that any signal or recording can be transferred to anywhere in the facility, almost instantly. EVS makes this a reality.”

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Review: Elemental Multiscreen Video Coverage for the 2012 London Olympics

The clock ticks towards 9:00pm local time in London and the Opening Ceremonies for the 2012 Olympic Games are just minutes away. Fans in attendance and in their homes around the world await the spectacle they have been anticipating for months. Athletes prepare to enter the grand stage, a moment they have been working towards for years. These two groups—the fans and the athletes—are integral to the success of the Olympic Games and their stories are highly publicized. Nearly invisibly in the background, a third group works to bring the event to a global audience: the broadcast rights-holders. This is the culmination of a relentless effort to provide the best possible viewing experience to an audience using a host of digital media platforms to tune into Olympic events. Seven years in the making, these next two weeks prove which networks hold the world’s attention through ubiquitous video delivery of the Summer Games.

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Review: Genelec DSP Loudspeaker Systems Used for the London 2012 Olympics

The Genelec speakers were used for monitoring the audio for BBC channels 1, 2 and 3, which were broadcasting a combination of 5.1, stereo, HD, SD and 3D transmissions. Located in the Olympic Park at the International Broadcast Centre, the galleries were the mixing point for virtually all of the broadcaster’s Sport TV output during the Games. BBC Studios and Post Production Sound Supervisor Peter Bridges explains that DSP was used to line up the speakers in a challenging monitoring environment: “There is often compromise in setting up temporary control rooms, but soon after the Genelecs were set up and aligned we were able to start mixing.”

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Viessmann FIBT World Cup Launches Into New Season

The 2012/13 FIBT World Cup season is adding a new highlight to its calendar – the FIBT Triple Trophy. The International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation (FIBT) and Infront Sports & Media, its media and marketing partner for the FIBT World Cup and World Championship events, are introducing the Triple Trophy as an innovative 100,000 Euro jackpot concept, which requires athletes from each discipline to win three pre-defined race highlights within the season. Also in commercial terms the FIBT looks forward to an exciting and fruitful season: All sponsorship packages available have been successfully sold by Infront for the FIBT World Cup as well as the World Championships.

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One More Time in Afrikaans

The 13th “Huisgenoot-Skouspel” was hosted at Sun City’s Superbowl during four days in October. The show, which had been described as the largest Afrikaans music performance of the year, saw a collaboration of 60 artists performing 80 songs in a three hour period. Gearhouse Splitbeam provided the lighting gear with an MA control system, consisting of 1 x grandMA2 light, 1 x MA onPC command wing, 1 x grandMA2 fader wing, 1 x MA NPU (Network Processing Unit) and 3 x MA VPU plus (Video Processing Unit).

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New Martin MAC Viper, MAC Rig Light 2012 Danish Music Awards

The event, broadcast live on Danish station TV2, honored Denmark’s top musical names of the year with performances from Nephew, Outlandish and many others beneath a mix of Martin LED and HID sources. The lighting setup, which also included 150 compact MAC 101s™ used as audience lighting, along with other MAC luminaires, was one of the first shows in Denmark to use Martin’s new 1000 W MAC Viper, which Kasper integrated as background light for the presenter podium. On Saturday, November 10th, lighting designer Kasper Lange turned to a large Martin MAC rig that included Martin Professional’s new MAC Viper Profile™ for the 2012 Danish Music Awards at Forum in Copenhagen.

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Let it d&be: Reproducing Fifty Years of Music

Though we might argue the paucity of proper theatre on the West End stage these days, it's rare indeed that a show presents honestly, as totally without drama. Even so, the Beatles theatrical concert Let It Be at the Prince of Wales theatre has received excellent reviews for precisely that candour. The show's sound designer, Gareth Owen, offered a very rational explanation of why this might be, "Let It Be is very different from the typical juke box musical to which we've become accustomed; think of it more as a proper concert. There is no contrived knitting together of lyrics to weave a narrative; however it would be wrong to say it is without drama. The drama comes from the mix of a faithful live rendition of original material coupled with video footage of the band."

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Axon Partners with TSL Professional Products’ Newly Acquired SoundField

Netherlands–based Axon Digital Design has announced a new addition to its Synapse modular AV signal processing system. Developed in co-operation with SoundField, which was recently acquired by TSL Professional Products Ltd; the latest Synapse addition takes the form of a dual digital audio up-mixer and down-mixer based on SoundField algorithms. Designated DSF66, the device is a dual hardware stereo-to-5.1 up-mix and down-mix processor, designed for HD broadcasters who use archived stereo material and wish to generate high quality 5.1 broadcast mixes from stereo soundtracks.

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tmt27: Expertise in Audio Media

From November 22-25, 2012, the Tonmeistertagung will take place at the Congress Centrum Nord of the Cologne Exhibition Center for the first time. The biennial international professional convention, which also features an exhibition, will leave its present venue – the CCL at Leipzig – and move to the city by the Rhine River. This follows the VDT’s long-standing tradition of changing the location of the Tonmeistertagung every couple of years. Centrally located in Europe, Cologne is the perfect place for the Tonmeistertagung thanks to its ideal national and international transport links and the large number of broadcasters, recording studios, and production companies nearby. In addition, Cologne is a major cultural center of international significance, offering countless attractions. In view of Cologne’s large catchment area and easy access, for example, from the Benelux countries, Frankfurt, and the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan area, the VDT expects a noticeable increase in the number of visitors and a further strengthening of the international focus of the convention.

Some Highlights:

d&b: More than Powder and Water

DAS to Feature Horus

Lawo with New Products and Lectures

Nugen: Raising the Quality of Broadcast Audio

Stagetec Has an Accent on Loudness

Yamaha Helps Deliver Workshop on Small Venue Live Sound