36 TVBEurope Summer of Sports: OB Focus


The rise of club sport production


As remote production using WAN-linked OB buses gathers momentum with producers and production companies, a critical mass will result, meaning fewer OB buses sent to event arenas. The view of Swardeep Grewal, Technical Sales specialist, Net Insight, on testing the remote production concept


WITH CONNECTIVITY becoming ubiquitous in our lives it seems occasion for content consumption is also becoming ubiquitous, be it on the train, waiting in line, or simply surfing while in front of the TV. Greater occasion for consumption means greater demand for content and likely greater user- generated content to supplement traditional commercial sources. With this proliferation, one


can expect an extension to the event arenas where events previously too small to be worthy of commercial attention, but nevertheless with fervent followership, demand professional event production. These events’ audiences aren’t beleaguered with expectations of absolute realtime (SFN broadcast) delivery and can well tolerate an all-IP delivery, perhaps entirely with OTT. Potential sources of such content are likely to be university/club, football, hockey athletics and the like. For non-profit organisations like schools, producing such content offers an opportunity to promote their students, while for others such as regional football clubs it’s an opportunity to raise funds through content sales. However, bringing it all to fruition still requires access to professional production facilities at a palatable cost in order to meet the quality expectations of viewers. Hence the stage is set for


remote production of Outside Broadcast events. Remote production in context of club productions can make use of OB buses that are parked in their depots, in between


commercial broadcasts. By backhauling a handful of raw camera feeds and unmixed audio via a reliable WAN circuit from the arena site to a home- parked OB bus, a professional production at a fraction of the cost can avail (since there is no truckroll and setup costs). Net Insight, in partnership with customers in Europe, has successfully tested the remote production concept during a number of live events. These tests have taught us that successfully producing a sports event remotely demands not only transportation of the video signals but critically maintaining their sync and phase relationships despite using an asynchronous (Ethernet, IP).


Swardeep Grewal: Human resources deployed to arenas can be halved with more staff staying with the remote OB bus


transmission from a centreline camera in the future. We also expect that the


evolution of production cameras and CCUs will mean that IP interfaces will continue to prevail. The result: slow-mo cameras that had previously sent 3x HD-SDI phases from a CCU will consolidate onto a single 10G IP interface. In readiness for these IP


cameras, Net Insight is developing a SMPTE 2022 capability that will allow integration to the camera, allowing the video stream to be J2K compressed and transported to the WAN linked OB bus. Given that camera power, feeding occurs locally. The CCUs can also be remotely located at the WAN-linked OB bus to further


reduce equipment at the event arena. We hope that as


“The result: slow-mo cameras


that had previously sent 3x HD-SDI


phases from a CCU will consolidate


onto a single 10G IP interface”


Not only must video maintain sync/phase but indeed the audio also. Finally, a considerable volume of peripheral signals for support /control of media storage arrays and tally status may also need to be transferred from the event location to the WAN-linked OB bus.


The typical


configuration of such a production


requires that cameras and CCUs are located


at the event site while the camera control panels, audio, video boards and


producer are stationed in a WAN-linked OB bus. All audio feeds are MADI multiplexed on the event location and can be carried maintaining their phase relationship back to the remote OB bus via something like the Net Insight Nimbra MSRs. Similarly, control signals (RS-232, RS-422) are converted to Ethernet and carried via the


Nimbra MSRs using Metro Ethernet equivalent from the event location to the WAN- linked OB bus. Finally, choosing the bandwidth of the WAN links is critical as this dictates a significant cost component and prescribes the compression levels necessary to carry the raw feeds back to the OB bus. For 1080i HD our experience has been that a commercial production can be delivered with high quality with 100Mbps JPEG2000 compression per channel. This means that a slow- mo camera can be adequately serviced with 300Mbps and 1G will suffice to carry even a 4K


remote production using WAN-linked OB buses gathers momentum with producers and production companies, a critical mass will result, meaning fewer OB buses sent to event arenas. With OB buses spending less time shuttling around the overall production, availability of OBs will rise and in turn avail professional productions to a broader spectrum of arenas for content generators.


While we’re only stating that the idle time of OB buses can be utilised to produce second tier content, in practice, should Tier 1 content be produced in the same manner, then overall efficiency stands to increase with a reduction, if not a total elimination of transit time of the production vehicle. Human resources deployed to


arenas can be halved with more staff staying with the remote OB bus. Adopted on a larger scale, the contents of the production buses can be optimised to assure deployment of solely camera support equipment be included in the truckroll.


www.tvbeurope.com June2013


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