Newsletter from 02/02/2015
ISE 2015: A Focus on Live Events
MOBILE PRODUCTION
Gearhouse Provides World Class Broadcast Facilities for AFC Asian Cup 2015 Football
From its humble beginnings in 1956, the AFC Asian Cup has grown into the continent’s biggest football event bringing together Asia’s top national teams every four years. The 2015 competition is proving to be a global phenomenon with Asia's 16 top nations participating. Television viewership figures for the group stages of the AFC Asian Cup in China, Japan and Korea Republic hit record numbers while the number of people attending the games in Australia has reached over 400,000. The official Twitter feed @afcasiancup, which is running in five different languages, has reached more than 1.82 billion, making it one of the most talked about Asian football events in history and videos on YouTube have clocked in excess 3.3 million views, with more than five million minutes watched.
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NEP Sends Massive Facilities and Support Infrastructure to the Super Bowl
From a technical perspective, NEP’s ND1 will play a pivotal role, capping off its first season as the home for the Sunday Night Football production team with arguably the world’s biggest single-day sports event of 2015. ND1 comprises four interconnected trailers, with much of the production work itself centered on the Grass Valley Kayenne Elite 9M/E production switcher, Calrec Artemis and Apollo audio consoles, 32 Sony HDC2500 cameras, Canon lenses, and more than 100 channels of EVS recording capability via 14 EVS XT3 replay stations within a single production trailer. The Super Bowl will see the EVS complement expand to 19 and the number of cameras to more than 50 for game coverage.
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WTS Implements Snell Routing, Infrastructure and Control for SuperSport Africa OB Trucks
The OB vehicles are built on 40ft rigid Mercedes chassis to cope with the rough terrain they will experience on location, with double expanding sides, and each boasting 14+4 cameras. “As with the previous HD OB trucks WTS supplied to SuperSport, we have made ease of control the core attribute of these two new vehicles,” said Ben Murphy, WTS Sales Director. “This is a touchscreen-based system control and monitoring solution built on Snell control and customized by WTS. It allows the engineers to use a variety of devices – laptops, iPads and iPhones – to rapidly alter the setup of a truck, giving the production team the perfect environment for a wide range of programme output.
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STUDIO PRODUCTION
ETB Installs Riedel Communications Infrastructure at Main Production Center in Donosti-San Sebastián
The Artist solution at ETB's Miramón production center provides a distributed, decentralized, scalable architecture for communications. The 160 x 160-port Riedel intercom system is composed of Artist 128 and Artist 32 mainframes with 56 ports configured for control panels, 80 ports for analog four-wire, eight ports for VoIP usage, and eight ports for a party line system. The entire system ensures AES3/EBU audio quality, with level controls at each individual crosspoint, nonblocking connections, and redundant power supplies and controllers. The Artist units are complemented by 46 of Riedel's 2000 LCD Series control panels, one CCP-1116 commentary control panel, 10 wired belt packs, and various VoIP multiplexers.
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Orad and Kronomav Bring Curved Tracking to Virtual Studios
A long-time Orad technology partner, Kronomav designed a new protocol that provides Orad tracking systems with the required real-time tracking position and orientation of the K2 robotized dolly. The new protocol features an easy-to-use wizard that allows users to move the dolly in different predefined locations on the rail. The system’s absolute encoders are integrated in the K2 dolly, ensuring all relevant tracking data is sent to the Orad tracking system. Orad’s Tracking Set application receives the tracking data and transmits it to its HDVG rendering platform, allowing the graphics to be positioned anywhere in the studio, while the camera moves along the rails.
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BT Sport Studios Achieve Centralized, Tapeless Workflow with Draco tera enterprise KVM Matrix Switches
Timeline Television worked with Megahertz to build a full broadcast facility in less than 8 months, achieving one of the largest and quickest broadcast installations in the industry. “BT Sport was clear on their overall objectives,” explained Ian Martin, Broadcast Solution Consultant for AIT partnership group. “Complete flexibility to interconnect hundreds of workstations throughout the building to banks of remotely-located electronic equipment; so that edit suites, galleries and office spaces could operate without needing to install noisy and heat-producing equipment locally. Any workstation has to be able to connect to any source device; under user control but subject to administrator restrictions.”
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SPORTS
41 Million Watch 2015 CBA All-Star Game on CCTV-5
Over 41 million individual TV viewers enjoyed the full evening entertainment, which featured not only the game, but also the Tsingtao Laoshan Brewery Skill Challenge, the Li Ning Slam Dunk Contest and the FAW-Volkswagen Three-Point Shoot-Out. Audience figures reached a peak for the latter as over 13 million people tuned in. In total, the two days of the competition – featuring Saturday’s Rookie game and contest preliminaries and Sunday’s elite match and contest finals – reached a cumulative audience of over 85 million.
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Lawo Gives First-Class Service at Australian Open
Lawo staff went down under in order to support Gearhouse Broadcast in setting up and commissioning the Lawo systems. Of the nine mc²56 consoles, five are networked via a Nova73 HD to provide sound feeds for host broadcaster, Tennis Australia. Four of the mixers are deployed to deliver sound from the Rod Laver Arena, Hisense Arena, Margaret Court Arena, and Courts 2, 3, 6 and 8. A further mc²56 provides the world feed for the rights holder. All stageboxes are interlinked by the central Nova73 router, and are assigned via access rights management to the respective audio control rooms. The mixed 5.1 surround signal is send to the V__pro8 units for embedding.
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HBS Appointed Production Partner of the 28th SEA Games
The Games, which will take place in Singapore from 5 June to 16 June, will see a return to Asia for HBS – who have a long track-record of success in the region dating back to the host broadcast of the 2002 FIFA World Cup Korea/Japan™. Since then the company has worked on several major events in Asia as part of IGBS, the 50-50 joint venture with IMG, including the 15th Asian Games Doha 2006, 16th Asian Games Guangzhou 2010, 17th Asian Games Incheon 2014 and the 7th Asian Winter Games Astana-Almaty 2011. HBS will provide – with the support of IGBS – live production for 16 sports and disciplines, with a 6 to 16 camera plan for each sport, and ENG coverage for the remaining events. Daily highlights shows, an overall event highlights show, vignettes, graphics and fixed beauty shots will complete the production plan.
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SHOWS
Robe Takes One Breath with Anna Calvi
Factors galvanizing the production were no flying facilities and only a single phase 63A power supply to run all the technicals – sound, lighting and a full camera shoot. This was split into two single phases to run the production. All these however, were easily outweighed by the excitement of being part of a distinctive show in an amazing site specific venue. In addition to the Heritage Orchestra, with whom Calvi had performed a Giorgio Moroda tribute earlier in the year at Sydney Opera House, the evening saw many exclusive collaborations with a series of special guests.
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Brilliant Stages for Helene Fischer’s Farbenspiel Tour
Fabrication of the 22m wide x 12.5m deep x 2.1m high main ‘A’ stage took place at Brilliant Stages’ site in Hitchin. The stage surface incorporated two 5m long travellators, a star trap and rear access steps, with the whole structure built on a rolling aluminium frame for easy deployment. The below-stage area was constructed with a series of passageways that linked three main dressing areas and gave crew- and artist-access to the star trap, crew travellators and a passerelle leading to the ‘B’ stage. Two rolling low-level tech risers flanked stage left and right positions. Atop the main stage Brilliant Stages added two raised screamers, complete with handrails, and two sets of ‘lily pad’ risers – a series of overlapping, circular band risers constructed from 23 sections of staging and supported by aluminium frames.
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Clay Paky Fixtures Help Coheed and Cambria Tell Their Story on Tour
Coheed and Cambria, the American progressive metal band whose innovative concept albums tell the sci-fi story of The Amory Wars, has wrapped a concert tour that included a complement of Clay Paky A.leda B-EYE K20s and Sharpys. Coheed and Cambria recently toured with the band Thank You Scientist, playing 25 dates across the US and in Toronto. Coheed and Cambria’s setlist followed “In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3,” their 11-year old second album, which has recently been remastered and rereleased. Clearwing Productions supplied the lighting package for the tour, which included Clay Paky fixtures.
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PRODUCTS
Avolites Ai Infinity Servers Process Incredible Data to Power Linkin Park
US rock band Linkin Park recently stormed into London's O2 Arena, performing in front of a spectacular backdrop powered by Avolites Ai Infinity servers running version 8. The rockers played two nights in London and one in Manchester as part of the European leg of their 'The Hunting Party' tour, with a 'stark and edgy' show that saw unique looks for each song. On stage, sharply angled semi-transparent screens deliver layer upon layer of dynamic content effortlessly mixing pre-recorded video with live cameras. Two Avolites Ai Infinity Servers were spec'd to handle the extensive HD camera feeds and visuals triggered in real time and deliver them to the array of LED screens.
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Audinate Powers Skype TX with NewTek and QuickLink
Two new Audinate partners are releasing products that use Dante audio over IP to connect Skype TX to broadcasts. NewTek is using Dante Virtual Soundcard to deliver flawless digital audio from Skype to Dante-enabled products from hundreds of manufacturers while Quicklink Video Distribution Services Ltd has announced a strategic partnership with Audinate The partnership enhances the Microsoft Skype TX experience delivered through the Quicklink TX product by adding in Dante Audio over IP connectivity.
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Al Jazeera Upgrades Weather Graphics With Metacast 2.0
One of the key goals for the Metacast 2.0 release was to create an even more efficient workflow for ChyronHego customers. Throughout the process of updating the product, the development team was in close discussion with key customers to learn about their experience with the product and gather their feedback. Based on these discussions, ChyronHego has drastically improved the user ergonomics for common operations in the 2.0 release — making Metacast the market’s most user-friendly weather graphics solution with no compromise in features or performance.
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3D/4K ARISING
Barnfind and Village Island support 4K Live Sporting Event Broadcast
The Barnfind BarnOne BTF1-07 WDM system was used for 4K live transmission between WOWOW’s studio and the Belle Salle Akihabara Event Hall in Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo. Barnfind’s BTF-1-07 can transmit eight 3G-SDI signal over WDM without loss of synchronization, allowing easy transport of 4K or even 8K uncompressed signals. WOWOW used a single 1RU BTF-1-07 on each site for simultaneous transmission and reception of a 4x3G-SDI signal. “It was very nice for the operators to monitor the transmitted 4K signal by the return path in a 1 RU unit,” said Michael van Dorpe, CEO of Village Island, Barnfind’s local partner in Japan.
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IHSE Releases New Extenders for 4K/UHD Video
New Draco vario Dual Link and DisplayPort extenders enable the transmission of 4K video to one single monitor at up to 4096 x 2160 at 30 Hz and 2560 x 2048 at 60 Hz. The extenders can be used in pairs to extend signal transmission to 140 m with Cat X cable or 10 km with fiber. They are compatible with all Draco tera KVM matrix switches allowing integrators to build extremely flexible video and data distribution networks with any number of connections up to 576 ports. To further ensure overall system integrity, all Draco extenders include redundancy options allowing a range of scenarios to be implemented to ensure system operation in the case of link failure.
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