From Broadcast Engineering Magazine – February 2011

http://broadcastengineering.com/hdtv/broadcasting_canadas_proshow_size/

In the world of mobile production vehicles, bigger is not always better. While the typical state-of-the-art 53ft tractor trailer certainly makes for a roomy work environment that can [...]]]>

From Broadcast Engineering Magazine – February 2011

http://broadcastengineering.com/hdtv/broadcasting_canadas_proshow_size/

In the world of mobile production vehicles, bigger is not always better. While the typical state-of-the-art 53ft tractor trailer certainly makes for a roomy work environment that can accommodate a large number of sources for a multicamera production, there are times when they aren’t a good fit — either due to limited available space onsite or limited budgets.

Proshow, a Canadian equipment rental and production services company in Vancouver, B.C., has built a new HD 38ft rig that is proving its 30,000lb weight in gold. Using a Peterbuilt chassis, the truck was built by Gerling Associates as part of its Stallion series of production truck offerings.

Cost was certainly a factor in deciding the size and equipment complement of the truck, but Tim Lewis, president of Proshow, said it was also about recognizing an unfulfilled market niche and listening to what its broadcast clients needed most.

Proshow got its start as an audio equipment rental and service company, where it worked with many broadcasters in Canada. The company then expanded to include fly packs complete with a full complement of video gear (cameras, switcher, etc.) to help broadcasters like Global Television produce their annual telethons and other news segments. (The recent Winter Olympics in Vancouver made heavy use of its equipment during the month-long games last February.) 

SMALLER IS (SOMETIMES) BETTER

The issue of a smaller truck came up time and again in conversations with current and prospective clients looking for an economical way to produce a live multicamera event without compromising on quality. Those discussions soon led to the design and build of Proshow’s first truck, dubbed Prodigy. It was built in 2008 and designed for SD productions, with the expectation that an upgrade to HD was inevitable. 

Sure enough, in the fall of 2009, Prodigy was upgraded to HD capability and began working on events like the WHL finals in the spring of 2010. The summer saw the signing of a new contract with Graystone Media for broadcasts of the University of Oregon Ducks football team. Proshow began covering every home game and some away games in 2010. As the team went forward winning all of its games and moving into contention for college football’s national title, ABC and ESPN were also on hand undertaking national broadcasts. The OSN games appeared on Comcast throughout the northwest United States

For each Ducks home game, Proshow’s truck helped Graystone produce a live pre-show, the actual game and often a post-game show. Graystone produces the game for the Oregon Sports Network (OSN) to provide Ducks sports coverage. If ABC/ESPN were carrying the game, OSN’s production was rebroadcast up two hours later on Comcast.

LARGER PRODUCTIONS WITH SMALLER GEAR

To accommodate the more complex live sports telecasts, some additional equipment, including new Canon 86X HD telephoto lenses, a second EVS replay server (for a total of 12 channels) and a Blackmagic Design Videohub (72 × 144 I/O) router, were installed on-board the newly refit ProdigyHD. A Sony MVS-8000GSF 2.5 M/E HD production switcher, eight Sony HXC-100 HD cameras on triax, a Yamaha digital audio console and an expanded number of Blackmagic mini signal converters were also added to increase its flexibility and ability to handle a variety of SD or HD projects.

The miniconverters are used to handle any of the numerous formats they work with at the different venues throughout Canada and the U.S. These include Blackmagic’s new up/down/crossconverters that are used to downconvert HD signals for displays on producer and program monitors outside the truck.

Always on the lookout for new, more efficient (and lighter) ways of doing things, the Proshow engineering crew controls the Videohub router via a new (free) app on an Apple iPad, which allows them to fully program the monitor wall and reroute sources as necessary from the tablet touch screen. 

Because the inside of the truck is more crowded than larger trucks, space efficiency was certainly an issue when installing the equipment. Lewis and Mark Fisher, Proshow’s vice president of engineering (who led the installation), were careful to choose compact yet highly dense equipment that offered as many features as possible. The truck includes only two 6ft high racks of terminal gear. The Videohub is used for all of the monitoring of the truck (including a battery of Marshall LCD monitors at the front of the Production area and elsewhere displaying different sized sources with Miranda Kaleido-Alto multiviewers). A separate Nevion Sublime (64 × 64) router handles the live production sources.

FILLING IN THE GAPS

Lewis said the goal for Prodigy was always to fill in the gaps left by the larger production companies, not compete with them. The OSN/University of Oregon wanted to go HD this year for the first time, but didn’t want to incur the expense of a larger rig and all that comes with it. The price and availability of Prodigy provided the perfect fit. 

The Prodigy HD truck is now contracted to do a dozen Oregon Ducks basketball games this winter and the 2011 Ducks baseball season starting this spring, as well as this spring’s track and field season. Graystone Media has also secured the truck for its coverage of the WHL on Fox Sports Northwest. The truck also is sometimes used as a “B” rig for larger production by companies like Dome Productions (Canada) and Trio Video (Chicago).

Another benefit of a smaller truck, according to Lewis, is that Proshow doesn’t have to have it working 200+ days a year (like the multimillion dollar large trucks) to make the business model work; they can arrive at a venue and be ready for crew call (referred to as “park and power”) in only 30 minutes, about a third of the time it takes the larger trucks to do. After the game, the Proshow crew usually drives away about 90 minutes after the buzzer. As a result, the cost (fuel and crew expenses) to run the ProdigyHD truck is far less than its larger brethren. 

Since after the Winter Olympics, the phone has not stopped ringing. Lewis chalks up the incredible interest to regional HD truck availability and having the right truck for the right price.

Michael Grotticelli regularly reports on the professional video and broadcast technology industries.

DESIGN TEAM - PROSHOW BROADCAST

Tim Lewis, president

Mark Fisher, vice president of engineering

TECHNOLOGY AT WORK

• Abekas HD ClipStoreMXc with four-hour drives
• AJA Video
  • Ki Pro HD ProRes DDR
  • FS1 frame syncs
• Blackmagic Design
  • Videohub HD-SDI router
  • Mini converters
• Canon HD lenses
• Chyron Duet HyperX² HD graphics system
• EVS XT[2] slow-motion servers
• Lance TDC-100 DDR controller
• Marshall Electronics
• 37in HD LCD multiviewer displays
• 20in HD monitors
• 17in quad-split monitors
• Miranda Technologies Kaleido-Alto HD multiviewers
• Nevion
  • Sublime router
  • X/Y programmable panels
• RTS ADAM-CS intercom
• Sachtler tripods
• Sony
  • HXC-100 HD triax cameras
  • BVM-L170 HD color grading monitor
  • MVS-8000GSF multiformat HD production switcher
• Tektronix WFM5000 waveform/vectorscope
• Yamaha M7CL digital audio console

From TV Technology Magazine - http://www.tvtechnology.com/article/112940

EUGENE, ORE.
When you’re charged with providing OB truck technology for the top-ranked Oregon Ducks, you have to be as nimble and creative as the players on the field.

At Proshow, a Western Canada-based provider of [...]]]>

From TV Technology Magazine - http://www.tvtechnology.com/article/112940

EUGENE, ORE.
When you’re charged with providing OB truck technology for the top-ranked Oregon Ducks, you have to be as nimble and creative as the players on the field.

At Proshow, a Western Canada-based provider of broadcast mobiles, flypacks, and corporate audiovisual services, we’ve built OB trucks for sporting and a variety of events on both sides of the border, including CFL and NCAA football, NHL, AHL and WHL hockey.We were contracted by Graystone Media of Portland, Ore. to provide mobile facilities for the Oregon Sports Network (OSN) broadcast coverage of the Oregon Ducks football games for the 2010 season. Graystone produces the games for OSN and they’re carried on cable throughout this part of the country. We used “Prodigy,” our compact 27-foot HD video production truck to originate television coverage of these games.

Football in Oregon is serious business, and the American sports community and national broadcasters are watching every play, especially in a year when the Ducks made a run for the national championship. Prodigy was built to handle exactly this type of coverage.

In our game coverage, we regularly shared the broadcast compound with the big guys like ABC and ESPN, but handled our own preshow and post show production, as well as provide a fully independent HD broadcast of the game itself. Of course, our producers always wanted every possible camera angle, so extensive cross-patching from the other major HD mobile production units was commonplace.

On top of this, we were responsible for providing numerous feeds to the production trailer handling all of the SD in-house video, known as “Duckvision.” When you combine that with about six different HD and SD VTR and DDR formats in the client’s workflow, we knew that we had to be ready to convert anything to anything.

To solve the “format wars,”, we secured more than 30 Blackmagic Design Mini Converters for use in the truck. The mix of Mini Converters included an assortment of HDMI-to-SDI, SDI-to-analog, analog-to-SDI, audio-to-SDI, SDI-to-audio, and SDI-to-fiber. We also recently installed a number of Blackmagic’s latest up/down/cross converters, as well as a 72×144 Blackmagic Broadcast Videohub router.

This assortment of converters has worked perfectly. We use the up/down/cross units for HD-to-SD downconversion for monitoring paths. HDMI to SDI is used to convert consumer HD “clock cameras” to SDI. And we use the SDI-to-analog converters to feed our portable video monitors. Our audio/SDI units serve as extra embedders and de-embedders for all the VTRs, and the SDI-to-fiber converters are perfect for the long transmission runs that only optical fiber can handle.

HANDLED IT ALL

We’ve built a seamless broadcast workflow with the Blackmagic converters that allows us to handle an event or stadium of any size. Most importantly, this technology has allowed us to work effectively with our clients and producers and to handle every format that they can throw at us.

Tim Lewis is the president and founder of Proshow.

For additional information, contact Blackmagic Design at 408-954-0500 or visit www.blackmagic-design.com.

From Broadcast Engineering Magazine - http://broadcastengineering.com/products/proshow-used-sdi-routers-1210/

Every two years, thousands of broadcasters descend on an Olympic host city like a horde of media-ravenous carnivores. In addition to the International Broadcast Center (IBC) provided for the rights holder broadcasters, the host city also provides a second media center [...]]]>

From Broadcast Engineering Magazine - http://broadcastengineering.com/products/proshow-used-sdi-routers-1210/

Every two years, thousands of broadcasters descend on an Olympic host city like a horde of media-ravenous carnivores. In addition to the International Broadcast Center (IBC) provided for the rights holder broadcasters, the host city also provides a second media center handles the 24×7 needs of the non-rights holder broadcasters. At the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, this facility was put in place by the Province of British Columbia at Robson Square in downtown Vancouver, and was called the BC Media Centre (BCMC).

Broadcasters needed easy and immediate access to all of the audio and video available to them through the BCMC. To get the feeds to them, we here at ProShow, a Western Canada-based provider of broadcast mobiles, flypacks, engineering and corporate audiovisual services, pulled together a routing network based around the Blackmagic Design Broadcast Videohub router and its Smart Control Panel software.

ProShow installed a 72 x 144 Broadcast Videohub as well as two 16 x 32 Studio Videohubs at the BCMC in the weeks prior to the opening ceremony, and maintained that network well after the last event was held. Throughout, we were able to route all of the feeds coming in from various sources through the Studio Videohub and give any broadcaster access to those feeds.

INSTALLATION

Installing and configuring the routers was simple. The routers come with SDI reclocking features, which allowed us to connect to long-distance equipment, as well as redundant power supplies and power fail protection, so we were ensured the system would be reliable. And we were able to connect to different formats on the same router because the routers are able to handle mixed SD, HD and 3Gb/s SDI connections.

After we had gone through the initial connections, we moved onto configuration. The routers have the ability to configure and change connections right from our desktop. We had more than 60 sources coming in to the system, including the BCMC press theatre, bookable and unilateral stand-up locations, multicamera feeds of Robson Square’s live entertainment, remote feeds from the media center in Whistler, backhaul feeds from broadcasters, and, the most popular item, multiple “beauty cam” shots in and around Robson Square from HD cameras placed around the two-block area. Router destinations included all of the HD LCD screens placed throughout the BCMC facility, the three giant LED walls for public viewing, and, of course, outgoing feeds to broadcasters’ control rooms and edit suites both in the BCMC and via fiber back to their home stations.

SOFTWARE CONTROL

We had to have total flexibility to manage the routers — in addition to giving broadcasters complete access. That is where software control was invaluable. Some workstations like our Master Control Operator or Press Theatre Technician needed to control multiple destinations; others like a simple edit suite or outgoing feed to a broadcaster only had a single destination assigned. The Smart Control Panel software allowed us to create customized control panels for each user that gave them full access to what they needed, without the visual clutter of things they didn’t need.

We also used the router’s Pushbutton View feature. This let us build an interface that allows users to easily navigate pages of buttons with concise and easy to understand descriptions. The Software Control Panel already came with a library of icon buttons and gave us the ability to customize the descriptions even more.

As an IP-based system, the Software Control Panel users were not limited just to those broadcasters that maintained edit suites and control rooms within the BCMC. We were able to give each of our broadcasters an IP address that they could connect into and grab the feeds they needed from anywhere. As long as they could get Internet access, they could access the routers. With a simple software app installed back at the station across the city, or across the continent, a news program could take an event in our Press Theatre live, switch to a beauty cam shot for the bumper to commercial, then switch to a unilateral camera on a stand-up riser and come back for a live interview, followed by a different beauty cam shot into the next break. This level of control and ease of use made the BCMC routing network really stand out.

And although they were located blocks away in the IBC, many of the rights holding broadcasters got in on the act and made use of the Software Control Panel to access our Press Theatre and beauty cams throughout the games.

By the end of the games, more than 3800 members of the media made use of the BCMC, and images taken from our network were used in nearly every country with a broadcast presence at the games.

What we accomplished and the ease with which our audience was able to use the routing infrastructure really could not have been made possible without software control. And it can be done at a fraction of the cost of the old hardware-based control. The Broadcast Videohub that was at the center of it all has now been installed in one of our HD broadcast trucks, where it continues to provide exceptional performance and flexibility.