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Undertaking a massive outdoor live production setup.
I’m looking for some advice on designing a production setup for a client. They run a huge outdoor athletic event spanning several miles or so at certain points. They want to run several cameras throughout a course, and broadcast to a live audience on location, with live commentary.
So not only do we need to run cameras over an extreme distance, but we need to be able to live switch everything on location. So the obvious challenges and potential solutions we’ve looked into are as follows:
What cameras to use and how do we transmit?
- They don’t have to be a super high end camera. Smaller, GoPro-ish is perfect.
- We’ve looked in to gopro. Although the cameras themselves are great for what we want, their streaming ability is far too limited.
- We could combo a gopro, or gopro like camera with a teradek system, and build a wireless network, but we’re looking at upwards of 6 grand per camera just to transmit in that case.
- We could use an IP camera and do long runs over ethernet
What sort of production switcher can handle this?
- Obviously something like simple BNC cable isn’t going to fly with the distances we’re looking at so most broadcast switcher hardware I know about isn’t going to fly.
- If we went with a teradek solution with something like a go pro, that would require a switcher able to handle a lot of HDMI inputs. Does a solution like that exist? I know blackmagic has some equipment but would anything meet these needs?
- Can we realistically convert that many HDMI/ethernet signals to something usable by a conventional production switcher?
Hoping someone can chime in with some advice. I’m beginning to think we might be out of our league. I have a lot of live production experience, but I’ve never attempted anything on this large of a scale.
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3 Replies
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I know that large golf tourneys use a mix of microwave and “tactical fiber” fiber-optic cable, which is buried in unobtrusive “slit” trenches. I would imagine un-armored ethernet cable with baluns could be used similarly, for a short time. can you put up masts for antennas on the (I’m presuming motocross racing) course?
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I haven’t used them and don’t know much about them, but I just read a short article about the ATEM Converters from Blackmagic Design. You can run HDSDI/Return/com over optical fiber, which can go very long distances. Since you can convert it back down to standard signals on the receiving end you can use whatever production switching gear you are used to using.
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/atemconverters
Might be worth a look.
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My advice on this is to Go Pro…and I do not mean the GoPro camera, I mean go professional. For the scale and live requirements, failure is not an option. If you do not have the experience of doing something of this scale, then don’t. Hire someone else. Who?
Go make a contact at a professional golf event nearby (if you are in the U.S. there should be a men’s PGA event every week somewhere; or a Ladies PGA event; if in Asia, World Sports Group will be the ones to contact). Best days are during cable-laying, setup and testing days – probably Mon-Wed. Main event is from Thurs-Sun when they’ll be too busy for you. There will be an OB van/TV Transmission area where the bosses will.
Thomas Leong
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