Open Season For OMNEO By RTS

This year's Open Golf Championship returned to Muirfield in the north of Scotland, in the midst of a UK-wide heatwave. At the centre of this year's ESPN broadcast was RTS + OMNEO...

ESPN provided coverage for the US, with OB by CTV Outside Broadcasts via the newly released OMNEO networking architecture from RTS, part of Bosch Communication Systems.
CTV is something of a giant in OB productions. Over about three decades, it has become one of the largest independent OB companies in Europe, with a fleet of trucks and a portfolio that includes the opening and closing ceremonies of the London 2012 Olympics, the 2013 BAFTA Film Awards, numerous cricket and NFL fixtures and international golf championships.
For this year's Open, CTV took along some ten OB trucks in total, at the centre of which was RTS + OMNEO. The two-part networking service is able to supply both program transport and system control and is naturally ideal for OB applications such as the Open, where the system needs to be re-adaptable at short notice.
OMNEO's power lies in its multichannel audio transmission and system control via standard Ethernet IP networks.
It enables cooperation between audio systems via IP digital network equipment and as a result will find pride of place within professional AV applications of up to 10,000 devices.
OMNEO has two components: an audio program transport protocol suite and a control protocol suite that provides system control for pro networks of any size.
Regional Film decided to take a trip up to Muirfield to have a look for ourselves, and were lucky enough to be shown around the site by Hamish Greig, Director of Engineering at CTV. We caught up with him again, post-tournament, to see how everything went.
"I've worked on a lot of big productions and this was one of the most complex I've been involved with, and yet the amount of faults was absolutely miniscule," he said. "Every camera worked. Every cable worked. We may have had a few problems on the first day or two with some flashing monitors, but that was really the only issue we had."
When asked how OMNEO fared, Hamish said: "OMNEO did its business, we were very impressed with it. The whole com setup worked incredibly well.
"The first advantage of using OMNEO is that it saves cabling. I mean we had about 200 adapter panels across our production in all the different areas, so any cabling that you can save is ultimately a bonus. It made the management of the panels much easier.
"But the success of the system was also to do with the Tribus and the RVON cards. The whole thing just came together really well and functioned brilliantly."
It needed to. As Hamish says, this was one of the most complex setups he had worked on to date.
The system consisted of a 128 port ADAM matrix in OB 9 connected via Tri-buss expansion to another De-rigg ADAM matrix appearing as one complete system. RVON (RTS Voice Over Network) tielines were provided back to Bristol in the USA for connectivity to the ESPN facility there. Two Cronus matrices in OB 1 connected to the ADAM Tri-Buss system via analogue tielines with a TrunkMaster intelligently controlling the audio routing and allocation of these making the system easy to use for the operators. Tri-Buss expansion now offers both redundant ring and mesh wiring schemes also.
"It all worked really well," Hamish remarked.
"We integrated lots of different cameras into the system. We had eight tracking cameras, to do reverse tee-shots and track the ball along the fairways. Included in our setup were 42 line cameras, high-motion cameras, four remote heads and an aeroplane. And the system was fully integrated, so everything was available anywhere.
"The OMNEO networking cards were also able to be re-programmed from one of the remote stations," Hamish revealed.
Given the nature of live sports broadcasting, adaptability was always going to be an issue.
But one of the main compliments paid by CTV to OMNEO on this particular project was its flexibility and configurability.
OMNEO supports daisy-chaining of up to 20 keypanels, each providing fibre and Ethernet connectivity with two RJ45 connectors via a network switch module. The second RJ45 can be used to provide access to the network allowing configuration of the system.
"We put OMNEO in the main production area, meaning we were able to make on-the-spot adjustments, as and when we needed to," Hamish said.
"It worked incredibly well and was a huge bonus compared to previous years, when we would have to relay to someone in Sound and then have to update it. It just made the whole communication flow a lot easier."
Read the feature in the online edition of Regional Film & Video here.
(IT/JP)