Developing a New HD Outside Broadcast Truck, by Wilbert Kooij

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Developing a New HD Outside Broadcast Truck

by Wilbert Kooij, November 27, 2007

Head of Technical Investment, DutchView

With over 1500 productions a year, large and small, DutchView is the market leader in outside broadcasts in the Netherlands. We have sister companies in ENG and post production, and we aim to be the leading provider in our home country, as well as developing business across Europe.

DutchView was spun out of the Dutch Broadcasting Services Organisation NOB in 2002. Since then we have worked at modernising our facilities, moving to an all-digital platform and migrating towards tapeless production. We felt the time was right to offer high definition capabilities, so we set out to build a new truck, which we call DV2.

The truck will be used primarily for sport, but we also do a lot of music events — from rock to classical — and other productions such as theatre work. We therefore needed to build flexibility into the design of the new unit. The new DV2 replaces an old unit in our fleet of five full outside broadcast trucks, plus a sixth smaller vehicle we use primarily for webcasts.

Having decided to build a new, HD outside broadcast unit we took a careful look at the market, both in terms of the equipment available and systems integrators to build it for us. The move to HD was a good opportunity to re-evaluate our equipment preferences.

Our conclusion, though, was that for the video equipment and infrastructure we would return to our preferred supplier, Grass Valley. The audio desk is from Studer: the first time we have used this manufacturer.

We also asked Grass Valley to design and build the truck, in association with Dutch systems integrator D&MS. This is a very successful collaboration for us, which has worked well in the past. Grass Valley provides the hardware, D&MS the systems integration. Together they deliver excellent quality — which is vital for us — at a competitive price. They have collaborated on previous trucks and studios for us, and we were content for them to build DV2 on that basis.

The truck itself is a DAF CF 85 with twin rear axles. While it is becoming increasingly common for outside broadcast units to be built into maximum size articulated trailers, you have to remember that our units work largely in the Netherlands, which is a small country with small roads. Bringing a large articulated truck into the centre of Amsterdam, for example, is a tough job. We prefer to use smaller vehicles just because of the access considerations.

The chassis went first to the coachbuilders, Akkermans in Oud Gastel, in the Netherlands. Both Grass Valley and D&MS are regular customers of Akkermans, the Grass Valley systems group having built 14 trucks with them over the last eight years, and Akkermans also work with other outside broadcast operators across Europe.

Structurally, DV2 is identical to our unit DV1, which ensures that our clients will feel at home. The only difference, of course, is that DV2 is HD throughout. As well as building the bodywork Akkermans installed the air conditioning system, which is based on standard units. We try to pay extra attention to “fresh air input” and other cooling demands which are involved with using flat screen monitors. With these monitors the heat is focussed to the front, direct in the directors face. We are working on a chique solution.

To save space in the relatively confined truck virtually all of the monitors in the various stacks are LCD displays, provided by Fokus. However, at the time of specifying the systems there was no “grade one” LCD display available in the market, so the vehicle has four Sony HD CRT displays: one for the technical director, three for camera matching by the vision engineers.

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Grass Valley Trinix

Because we work on a range of projects from sport to music, it is really important that the working environment is fully flexible. The production monitor stack, for example, has its own section within the Grass Valley Trinix router, which allows us to save and recall preferred monitoring set-ups, getting our displays quickly up and ready as we move from event to event.

The Grass Valley Trinix digital router is very highly regarded in Holland, and can be found in many of our competitors’ studios and trucks as well as DutchView’s. It is a very solid router: reliable and affordable. In fact, we have never had a failure with a Grass Valley router.

For the production switcher we selected the Grass Valley Kayak HD. Again, in part this is a continuity decision: our SD trucks also use Grass Valley switchers, usually the XtenDD family. There is a strong family resemblance so that, while the Kayak panel is not identical to the XtenDD, it is similar enough for our operators to feel familiar. In a business like ours, where we are continually working under pressure on live events, it is obviously very important for our operators to feel completely comfortable with key pieces of equipment such as the production switcher, and we involve them closely when making these decisions.

The Kayak HD is also easily switched between HD and SD, so we have no problems with changing formats between jobs, or even working in multiple formats. The Kayak we have chosen for DV2 is a 3 M/E model, which gives us the right balance between the physical size of the panel and the power we need for sophisticated productions.

For cameras we also returned to Grass Valley, this time for the new LDK 8000 camera, launched at IBC2006. We again involved some of our senior camera operators in evaluating brands, and our conclusion was in favour of the LDK 8000 not just because of the picture but because of the mechanical build quality and our experience of Grass Valley reliability.

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Grass Valley Kayak

We ordered 10 LDK 8000 cameras for the truck, although DV2 is built to support 12 cameras. Grass Valley products are readily available in the rental market. For larger projects we can combine trucks, which gives us additional production space as well as more facilities, without losing the ability to get the vehicles to where we need them.

On-board recording is to an EVS server: the slow motion and multiple replay functionality is pretty much a universal standard for sports coverage, and we find it useful in music and entertainment, too. The vehicle can also be equipped with Sony DVW and HDW VTRs.

Together with Media Refinery, we developed a realtime 3D graphics system called Xpression, and we have extended its capabilities to HD for DV2. Again, our operators and our clients are familiar with it, and they know it will meet their practical needs.

As noted earlier, our one major departure in this truck is in audio, where we have chosen a Studer Vista 8 router and mixer. With our sound supervisors we looked at a number of digital audio mixers, but the Studer stood out because of its user interface — we have never seen better.

We ran extended tests with Studer at their factory, and we were satisfied that, although it presented new functionality for us (functionality we needed for HD productions), it was engineered in a way that was familiar, and could be integrated into our single system vision that D&MS and Grass Valley are building for the truck.

Our standard intercom choice is the RTS Cronus, and we saw no reason to depart from that for this vehicle. It is flexible in operation, and of course it is easy to combine with other trucks or our studios when we need a bigger operation.

Having chosen our equipment list we handed the project over to Grass Valley and D&MS to complete the systems integration. They are working on the vehicle as I write, with the intention that it will be handed over to us in mid-summer, in plenty of time for our first HD sports commitments in the autumn.

In designing the system we wanted to create a truck that was highly adaptive. We need to switch between HD and SD, and between the preferred set-ups for our different clients. The systems integrators have done all this with push-button recall of customer settings.

We have chosen to pay a lot of attention to the looks of the vehicle, inside and out. It is important that our clients feel at home inside the truck: having all the technical power at their disposal is no use if they cannot use it to support their own creativity. Working with Grass Valley and D&MS, we believe we will achieve all our aims, of a technically advanced HD production unit that will be a comfortable, creative place to work.

All in all, we are very much looking forward to rolling out DV2, our first HD outside broadcast unit. We believe in multi-format recording, not just in HD and SD but also in live streaming formats such as Flash. These are very interesting times to be in the video industry: everything is changing, and hence the need to emphasise flexibility.

But we believe this is the right time to offer HD to the Dutch market. With DV2 and our skilled team of operators we will have an HD proposition that our competitors will not be able to match.