feature live news and sport
transport. Who doesn’t want to drive a smaller, lighter truck or van to achieve the same result? Saves a bundle on fuel costs. And put your hand up if you prefer physically lugging around heavy spools of coax. Health care costs are rising for news crews too you know.
meet military communication requirements and durability standards. It is, in effect, ‘battle hardened’. With Telecast tactical fiber you can run over the cable with a truck or slam it in a door and it will retain its integrity. There’s an inherent dependability in fiber that is simply unmatched, except by what else it can do.
For example, the number of copper cables required for a typical ENG shot is six. To achieve the same result, you only need one thin fiber cable. Copper is also subject to disruptions from electrical and RF interference, which are often prevalent in news gathering situations. In the same conditions, fiber doesn’t even flinch. It is impermeable to noise or other electromagnetic interferences. And because of its inherently robust nature, fiber requires far less maintenance. It’s almost as simple as making sure the cable doesn’t have mud or dirt obscuring either end of the strand.
I’ve already mentioned that fiber is thinner and lighter than copper cable, but let’s look a bit further at the practicalities of those basics. Fiber is much easier to store, deploy and
Approximately 3000ft of fibre cable - compact and flexible.
Despite
being much smaller than coax, fibre is a much fatter pipe, able to carry far more bandwidth and bilateral communicati ons of any type.
Telecast’s
CopperHead 3400 system.
While weight is an issue, space is too. Many broadcasters have operated within the same physical infrastructure they’ve occupied for decades, much of which is densely laced with heavy strands of bulky copper cable, often strung floor-to- floor, top-to-bottom, throughout. When they need to make a technology change, or upgrade existing equipment, where do they start? Which wires do you cut? Some will be live. Some will have been there for decades doing nothing, but the engineer who installed them 20 years ago has retired, so how do you know? It’s simply impractical to rip out and replace the old cable, and much of the infrastructure, without risking a wholesale calamity. What many have found is that it’s much, much easier and far more cost-effective - especially as they gear up to carry 3Gbps signals - to thread through a thin fiber optic cable that delivers everything and more that a broadcaster could want and still be operating flawlessly when the next generation of engineers takes over. And let’s not forget sports stadia and complexes, both existing and new. The need to be as close as possible to the action, on every play, has driven substantial technical developments that simply wouldn’t be practical with copper coax. For example, over the past 10 years we’ve increasingly enjoyed the implementation of Skycams, suspended over fields of play throughout the world. It’s almost inconceivable that these could have developed to their modern potential without the use of fiber optics for control, image capture and delivery. The stadium complexes themselves are often so vast that there is no other practical way to deliver HD signals, in particular, to multiple destinations within the stadium, let alone to a remote site, without fiber. Which is why most of them are in the process of retrofitting, or in the case of new venues, specifying fiber from the outset.
The trend toward fiber is not just a manufacturer initiative. It has been heavily influenced by high-end broadcasters throughout the world,
42 l ibe l november/december 2012 l
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which has driven development by companies like Telecast in tandem. For example, our well-known, widely adopted CopperHead camera transceiver system, first introduced a little over 10 years ago, was initially a trunk that needed to be carted around. It has now been reduced to a small device that snaps directly onto the battery plate of a camera.
Last year we introduced a version of CopperHead specifically designed for news gathering requirements, which provides a robust fiber optic link between a camcorder and the ENG or SNG news vehicle. The system simultaneously transports both digital (SDI or HD/SDI) and analogue (NTSC or PAL) programme video, plus audio, IFB, and intercom signals on a single, lightweight fiber optic cable between the camera and the system’s base station.
To maintain a competitive edge with the ability to capture and transmit multiple live images each and every day, CopperHead enables the user to get live shots or video productions done fast, right, on time and on budget, which tracks with the both the need to get on air fast, but the need to do it economically. Many of the world’s largest and fastest growing news organisations have now standardised on a range of specialised CopperHead variations for just those reasons.
I would be remiss if I didn’t highlight the fact that Miranda has also championed the use of fiber and provides fiber connectivity and efficiencies right across its range, from routers to multiviewers and its many modular products. More specifically, Miranda recently launched LUMO, a new high-density fiber converter series that provides 36 I/Os in a 1RU frame, which is a tremendous benefit to broadcasters as well as systems integrators. The integration of Miranda and Telecast genuinely presents customers with a true glass-to-glass fiber solution.
As I said at the beginning, news and sport are inextricably linked and have held mankind rapt for centuries. In fact, the origin of the modern marathon has its roots in the delivery of news.
Legend has it that Pheidippides, a Greek courier in 490 BC, ran 25 miles to Athens from a battlefield near the town of Marathon to bring news of a victory over invading Persians. Pheidippides, it is said, delivered his news, gasped and fell dead. I reckon he was carrying coax.
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