TVN Upgrade To HD/3D Production And Riedel Mediornet

TVN, a leading TV production provider has upgraded its OB truck for HD and 3D productions. As part of the change, the connections for set and remote operation of the 20 camera truck were switched to Riedel MediorNet.
In addition, the entire audio system was completely rebuilt. The audio router is now a Lawo mc256 digital audio router; the intercom system is based on two Riedel Artist Digital Matrix Intercom mainframes (Artist 128 & Artist 32) with about 50 Artist 1000 control panels.
At the heart of the TVN-Ü2HD OB truck installation are five MediorNet mainframes that act as pre-routers for up to 32 HD-SDI signals connecting to eight stage boxes that are used on the OB truck's productions.
Those stage boxes are also based on MediorNet and provide bi-directional transport over a single fiber link of up to four 3G, eight HD or 30 SD video signals as well as audio, intercom, or control data such as TCP/IP or serial RS232/422 data.
Since MediorNet is based on a real-time network with an arbitrary number of different topologies, signals can be routed not only between the stagebox and the OB truck, but also between individual stage boxes or from a single stagebox to multiple stage boxes.
"The connection of the stage boxes via MediorNet enabled us to transport a large number of different signals such as video, audio and GPIOs. This significantly reduces the amount of time that we need for setting up. Plus, it also makes our system a lot more flexible because we can easily change the routings of a stagebox without any problems," said Wolfgang Peiss, Head of Sales at TVN Mobile Production.
The Lawo audio router and the Artist intercom system are connected to the MediorNet network via MADI, while the Miranda NVision 8208 router is connected via coax video cables. MediorNet not only provides a fully synchronized real-time network including all stage boxes, but also offers easy to use sync distribution for the entire system. The integrated Frame Store Synchronizer on all inputs allows for synchronizing asynchronous signals to a BlackBurst or TriLevel sync clock. MediorNet offers another elaborate and robust sync feature: if MediorNet is synchronized to an external clock and the external clock fails, MediorNet seamlessly takes over for it. When the external sync is running again, MediorNet adjusts the clock in small steps and finally hands over full clock control back to the external master clock.
Additional features, such as the integrated software-based embedding/de-embedding or timecode insertion at all inputs and outputs, eliminate the need for further external devices, which would be normally used for these tasks.
Integrated control of the system is realized via LSB's Virtual Studio Manager (VSM). Further changes to the MediorNet system can be made with Riedel's configuration, monitoring and control software MediorWorks. In addition to the VSM panels in the OB truck, supplementary VSM panels can be broken out via MediorNet's Ethernet ports.
"Our OB trucks are used at various sports and event productions. The possibility to not only have several video, MADI, AES and analog audio inputs and outputs, but to also have a large number of connections for Ethernet, VSM control panels, intercom panels or commentary units, allows for really flexible production scenarios. This way we can easily make setups that are a lot more complicated than in the past," said Christoph Moll, Chief Production Engineer at TVN Mobile Production.
(LB)