OB999 Accelerates Hill Climb Broadcast

However, this wasn’t the only impressive vehicle at the Hill Climb’s celebratory weekend. Capturing all of the action for guests and livestream viewers was a decommissioned ambulance, playfully nicknamed OB999, which has been painstakingly fitted out as a professional, multipurpose OB vehicle by Nick Collier of High Viz Media.

“Unlike the conventional curved shape of traditional vans, an ambulance is very square and chunky, plus the fact that its body shell is very robust and durable makes it a perfect blank canvas to build an OB environment,” begins Nick. “Once we’d stripped back the unit, we had plenty of space to fit in a six person team, comprising sound, video, production and director stations quite comfortably.”

A Blackmagic Design production and routing infrastructure is housed in the new OB vehicle, and Nick explains that the workflow was specifically designed with this in mind. “I’ve been an advocate for Blackmagic Design in broadcasting since I first bought an original ATEM Television Studio. I just couldn’t believe what the kit could do, how versatile it was, at that price point. And whilst the products have developed hugely since then, that ethos hasn’t changed.”

An ATEM 1 M/E Advanced Panel sits at the heart of the vehicle’s production desk, where for the hill climb, the team will produced a multicam mix for the event sponsor’s YouTube channel and for screens throughout the venue’s public and corporate areas. In order to provide coverage at every stage of the hill climb, and deliver this through Shelsley Walsh’s various platforms, more than 7km of fibre cable was laid alongside the famous track, together with a multitude of fibre converters.

Routing was handled through a Smart Videohub 40x40, which was complemented with a custom camera preview solution, which Nick built using Raspberry Pi and a Smart Videohub Cleanswitch 12x12. “As we often hire supplementary cameras for our large-scale OB events, we wanted to have a solution that would allow our rack engineer to recall the camera on preview.  So, alongside Blackmagic’s open SDK, we wrote a piece of code for the Raspberry Pi, so that when the engineer hits the paddle, the Smart Videohub Cleanswitch delivers the required camera feed to their screen.”

As with many live events, the team had to produce an engaging and interesting live program of content, whilst managing an ever-changing schedule. “We didn’t know exactly when Mitch's hill climb would take place, but we had to keep spectators entertained with big screen coverage, so we had a team of editors producing a lot of pre-recorded informative content that we could cut to in between live presenter led segments. The ATEM panel came into its own here, as we transitioned between both,” explains Nick. “It’s imperative that we’re able to react to changes in the schedule in real-time, so the low latency that Blackmagic Design kit delivers means that we could immediately show the viewers the best possible view of the action.”