Newsletter from 17/02/2015
BVE 2015: Focus on Live Production
MOBILE PRODUCTION
_wige SOLUTIONS Purchases Kahuna 9600 for New Mobile Production Unit
Leading German broadcast facilities company, _wige SOLUTIONS GmbH, has purchased a Snell Kahuna 9600 production switcher for a new mobile production unit that will soon be joining its extensive fleet. Based in Meuspath, Germany, _wige SOLUTIONS has been supplying complete outside broadcast event services for over 25 years; this will be the sixth Snell switcher the company has purchased for its OB operations. The new mobile production unit, consisting of modular components to provide maximum flexibility, will be completed in spring 2015 and provide more broadcast possibilities than a conventional OB van.
Read more ...
Lyon Video Goes Long with Addition of Six Fujinon Wide-Angle XA99X's and Six HA18X5.5 Zooms
Lyon Video recently purchased six XA99x8.4 ultra-wide field production lenses to compliment the mobile production company’s Grass Valley LDX80 Worldcam cameras on its Lyon 14 mobile unit. The XA99x’s have already been used by ESPN for ESPN/ESPN2/SEC for NCAA football game coverage, including the 2014 Iron Bowl, Peach Bowl, Orange Bowl, and will be deployed on a daily basis for all types of programming produced by Lyon Video clientele. Other Lyon customers who have taken advantage of the new lenses include Fox Sports and Yahoo Media Productions. Fox Sports production crew shot vintage cars road racing at Mazda Laguna Secca Raceway with XA99x’s. And Yahoo Media used the lenses for coverage of their Red Carpet show at the 2014 Emmy Awards in Los Angeles.
Read more ...
Grass Valley Helps Mediatec Broadcast with Remote Solutions for Broadcasting Live Events
For Mediatec Broadcast bringing its viewers all the action from nearly a dozen horse racing tracks across Norway is a top priority. To keep costs down, Mediatec turned to Grass Valley, a Belden Brand, for a remote broadcasting solution that can send camera feeds via fiber connections to its main facility in Oslo. The company purchased 20 LDX Première cameras with digital triax connections and four LDX Première cameras with fiber connections. LDX Première cameras are easily upgradable, can switch between 1080i and 720p, and offer a feature set which is optimized for live productions. With their high sensitivity and dynamic range they deliver outstanding image performance even under the most demanding lighting conditions.
Read more ...
STUDIO PRODUCTION
Dolce Sport Romania Goes Live with Full Ross Virtual Solution
Dolce Sport is one of Romania’s leading terrestrial sports channels, broadcasting international sporting events and breaking the latest sports news to an audience of 1.4 million since 2010. Following the move to a new purpose-built studio building and a brand refresh to celebrate the channel’s 4th birthday, Dolce Sport has now partnered with Ross Video to help give the channel’s output a fresh new look. Ross Video has supplied a full turnkey virtual studio solution including Ross robotics, with the XPression graphics engine driving all virtual set, augmented reality, channel branding and ticker elements. The systems integration work was carried out by StudioTech, a Ross partner in Poland.
Read more ...
Lawo Upgrades for Bell Media
Having completed a series of significant upgrades to six control rooms at its Agincourt and Queen Street campuses in Scarborough, Ontario, in 2011, Bell Media (former CTV Canada) has expanded and integrated its Lawo mc²56 and zirkonXL consoles around a Lawo Nova73 router – creating a networked infrastructure with a total of five mc² series consoles. The initial installation supported migration from SD to HD, and included four mc²56 MkI digital production consoles and two zirkonXL consoles. These have now been joined by a further mc²56 MkII console.
Read more ...
Gearhouse Turns Maverik with the first ever UK Install of Snell’s latest Kahuna 360 Switcher
The project was completed in early January and incorporates an HD upgrade to their presentation studio and an additional HD gallery to Input Media’s facility portfolio. This latest addition builds onto the continued Input Media infrastructure upgrade project started back in 2012 which was engineered by Gearhouse Broadcast. The final element put in place by Gearhouse’s systems integration division was the Kahuna Maverik, Snell’s modular switcher panel. The bespoke design of the Maverik control surface enables valuable space saving in the gallery production area as the panel design is built from independent modules and only the required modules can be installed creating a bespoke panel design, which is smaller in footprint and more specific in function than factory shipped 1, 2 and 3 M/E control surfaces.
Read more ...
SPORTS
UCI Appoints HBS as Host Broadcaster of the 2015 UCI Track Cycling World Championships
Host Broadcast Services (HBS), a fully owned subsidiary of Infront Sports & Media, has been selected by the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) to serve as host broadcaster of the 2015 UCI Track Cycling World Championships, which will be held in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines from 18 to 22 February. HBS has appointed Euro Media France to provide the technical platform. Overall, HBS will operate more than 13 cameras at the event, carrying out the host broadcast with a team of 72 experienced staff. The HDTV signal will be provided to broadcasters worldwide. The UCI and its exclusive media rights partner Infront Sports & Media have distributed the rights to more than 100 countries and territories. Over 300 media representatives are also accredited onsite.
Read more ...
Bonhomme Triumphs in Abu Dhabi at Red Bull Air Race Season Opener
Hitting top speeds of 370 km/h while flying just above the turquoise waters of the Arabian Gulf, Bonhomme mastered the scorching temperatures above 30 degrees Celsius and the changing winds to take top honors with a time of 57.787 seconds in the first of eight races in 2015 of the world's fastest motorsport series. Hall was a close second on a glorious day for racing, just 0.084 seconds behind in 57.871 seconds, while Pete McLeod of Canada took third in 58.843 seconds in the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) official air racing world championship. Defending Red Bull Air Race World Champion Nigel Lamb ended up a disappointing fifth after being knocked out by Bonhomme in the Round of 8.
Read more ...
iStreamPlanet Helped Stream NBC Sports to Super Bowl Records
The key to success for live streaming a big live event like the Olympics or the Super Bowl isn’t something that’s apparent to the viewer. It’s the workflow telemetry, the ability to look into each step of the workflow to find and address any issues before they impact the end viewing experience. “Insight across the entire workflow is the key to successfully streaming a live event such as the Super Bowl,” says to Mio Babic, CEO and founder of iStreamPlanet. “Taking advantage of real-time telemetry and alerts we were able to monitor the quality of the source and the encoding and confirm ad marker and slate insertions, closed captions, and uninterrupted publishing in order to catch any issues before they could impact the viewer.”
Read more ...
Riedel Acquires Swiss Mobile Radio and Communications Specialist Tele Comm Sportservice AG
Riedel Communications announced the acquisition of the Swiss communications specialist Tele Comm Sportservice AG. For more than two decades, Tele Comm Sportservice AG has been a world-leading provider of communications solutions for temporary and permanent installations at live events. As an official International Ski Federation partner, the company specializes in supporting international ski competitions and other winter sports events. "Tele Comm Sportservice is an ideal fit for our portfolio," said Roger Hess, general manager of Riedel Communications Switzerland AG, headquartered in Zurich. "The regional strengths and core competencies of this established company in radio and communications, especially with regard to alpine skiing, offer us a perfect vehicle for driving continued growth."
Read more ...
SHOWS
Super Bowl XLIX Halftime Show Glitters with Clay Paky Lighting Fixtures
Clay Paky fixtures dominated the lighting rig for Katy Perry’s glittering halftime show at Super Bowl XLIX in the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. Lighting designer Bob Barnhart of LA-based Full Flood chose a large array of Clay Paky Sharpy, Mythos and A.leda B-EYE K20 fixtures for the 12-minute show. Super Bowl XLIX marked Barnhart’s seventeenth big game and his fifth as the primary or sole lighting designer. He served as lighting designer on last year’s Bruno Mars halftime show at Met Life Stadium in Rutherford, New Jersey. For Super Bowl XLIX Barnhart deployed 140 Sharpys, 120 new Mythos fixtures and 94 B-EYE K20s, all provided by PRG.
Read more ...
RES Realises Visual Event to Celebrate Sochi Olympics One Year On
London-based creative technology expert Realtime Environment Systems Ltd (RES) has provided the know-how for a spectacular visual event to mark one year since the Sochi Winter Olympics. The ambitious event at Sochi's beautiful Ice Palace featured a dramatic ice show and was staged by Russian TV company Channel One. RES co-founder and project manager Mark Calvert and established freelance Ai technician Martin Harvey used two S6 Ai Media servers to bring pixel mapping, video playback and realtime generative patches for LED screen media, with one DVI output controlling 70848 Pixels @ 328 X 216 to control the 41 LED stems suspended above the rink. The show ran from an S6 Ai Media Server, with master slave hot backup S6.
Read more ...
Bring Me The - ROBE - Horizon
Multi-Award winning - and Sheffield UK’s finest - metalcore rockers Bring Me The Horizon played a huge one off show at London’s Wembley Arena closing a phenomenal year, celebrating the conclusion of their 18 month global ‘Sempiternal’ album cycle … and their 10th anniversary. The band’s Lighting Designer Ben Inskip chose 70 x Robe moving lights as the backbone of the show – because he knows the products and knew they would deliver the results he wanted. He needed multi-purpose lights that could perform several tasks and that all balanced well together as an integrated package.
Read more ...
PRODUCTS
Next Generation sQ Servers Lower Cost and Provide a Path to the Future for Fast-Turnaround Production
Quantel announced the immediate release of a brand new range of servers for its Enterprise sQ fast-turnaround News and Sports production systems. The new servers have been designed from the ground up to take maximum advantage of the latest generation of disk and processing technologies. As a result, they are smaller, lower cost and much more powerful than the existing sQ400 and 800 servers, and provide a responsive platform to enable broadcasters to meet ever-shorter turnaround times in a broader range of live and near-live applications. The new servers are 100% compatible with existing Enterprise sQ systems. This means that current customers can expand and upgrade their systems with the latest technology rather than facing the expense and upheaval of complete system replacement. In this way the new servers extend the life of Enterprise sQ systems to 2020 and beyond.
Read more ...
GearBox Expands UK Rental Market Offering with Grass Valley LDX Cameras
GearBox, a UK-based rental company and part of the veteran broadcast technology supplier CVP Group, has acquired six LDX Première advanced imaging cameras and three LDX XtremeSpeed (LDX XS) 1X/3X/6X ultra-slow-motion cameras from Grass Valley, a Belden Brand. This purchase expands the United Kingdom rental market offering and exemplifies the strategic partnership the two companies have formed. “CVP Group’s partnership with Grass Valley has opened a lot of new doors for us. By broadening our scope of offerings, our clients have the ability to grow their productions with an entirely new and versatile camera choice,” said Stephen Ratcliff, rental director, GearBox. “Also, with the purchase of the LDX XtremeSpeed cameras, we’re answering the growing demand in the UK for an ultra-slow-motion camera that can handle high frame rates,” he added. GearBox’s new LDX fleet will be utilized across a range of productions including in-studio and live sports.
Read more ...
Sharing the Latest Industry Knowledge at this Year’s BVE2015
IABM will mark its biggest ever presence at this year’s BVE 2015 by holding a series of must-attend business seminars. The sessions will be led by a number of high profile speakers including representatives from one of the nation’s favourite soap operas and a top-flight premier league football team. Chaired by Director of Business Development and Technology at IABM, John Ive, the four seminars will be held back to back on the opening day of the event, Tuesday 24 February, in the Broadcast Tech and Workflow Theatre between 10.40am and 3.50pm.
Read more ...
3D/4K ARISING
I-MOVIX X10 UHD 4K Part of the Super Bowl XLIX Experience
Thanks to Chicago-based sports production specialists Fletcher Sports, the I-MOVIX X10 UHD technology has been used during the NFL Super Bowl XLIX Big Game, held at the University of Phoenix Stadium, Glendale, Arizona. For this very prestigious world sporting event - and one of the most watched game with an average record of 114,4 million US viewers - Fletcher Sports deployed a fleet of five I-MOVIX X10 UHD cameras, which were tied to Evertz DreamCatcher systems.
Read more ...
4K UHD and MPEG-2 MXF Recording
ARRI announces the upcoming release of Software Update Packet (SUP) 2.0 for AMIRA cameras, and the subsequent release of SUP 3.0. The former unlocks 4K UHD recording for high-resolution pipelines, while the latter enables MPEG-2 MXF recording for streamlined, broadcast-friendly workflows. Together they stretch the already wide spectrum of AMIRA’s deliverable options at both ends of the scale, making the camera an even more versatile production tool. Underlining the positioning and success of AMIRA as the perfect camera for productions ranging from documentaries, reportage and corporate films to TV and low-budget movies, these two major software updates in the first half of 2015 will enhance the feature-set in ways that respond specifically to customer requests and industry trends.
Read more ...