Live Production – The Tyrell Take With Stephan Murnane

What used to be a pipe-dream has now become very much a reality. Wireless acquisition and communication , whilst still facing some challenges has now become a reality that doesn’t require The World Bank involved to finance, and is accessible to most providers rather than the rarified few.

With products such as Intinor, Live U , AbonAir and Clear-Com for acquisition and communication over wireless or IP flexibility is available that before didn’t really exist. Ensuring that the highest quality broadcast signals reach your live production environment, with no compromise on quality or service. Let’s look a little closer at some of these solutions:

Intinor uses BRT (Bifrost Reliable Transport) which is optimized for live-video via public internet. BRT not just supports adaptive bitrate streaming with error correction, but also bonding (2x LAN, 1x WiFi-client, 8x SIM) offering redundancy for the internet connections thus allowing the highest possible robustness. 

With H264 and H265 and resolutions up to 4K applications Intinor Direkt Link encoders cover applications such as streaming to social media, web-TV, 4K/vr360, eSports and news/broadcast. The units are fully automated using tested and optimized settings and therefore do not need a technician.

LiveU provides portable live video acquisition solutions, producing technology for television broadcasters to enable live video links via wireless  HYPERLINK "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_network"cellular networks. LiveU offers a range of devices for live video coverage, including backpacks, software and mobile applications. LiveU’s solutions include multiple 4G LTE/3G, HSPA+, WiMAX and Wi-Fi cellular links, which are optimized for maximum video quality based on the available network conditions.

ABonAir have been a major player in the American RF video market and have now turned their attention to the UK market. They offer a small range of products covering standard point-to-point RF transmissions to 4K transmission with RF camera control, talkback and tally, all within a 7ms time frame. What’s great from our point of view is that they offer many improvements over the current players in our market including low latency transmission of only 7Msec (even 4K).

ROAMING CAMERAS
When camera operators are enabled to roam anywhere it then becomes even more important that a reliable and robust Wireless/IP talkback system is deployed to ensure that there is no loss in communication between the two. Clear-Com have been market leaders in this space for many years and consistently develop their products to ensure that as acquisition becomes more mobile communication doesn’t suffer. Their Freespeak II system once again sets the bar for others to follow for clear communication over IP and wireless.

The acquisition solutions mentioned above will provide a direct unmixed feed to streaming platforms, but often you will want to use multiple sources and either use your existing mixer and stream the program output using a program such Wirecast from Telestream (or similar) or use a solution like Livestream that provides all your switching capability along with the capability to handle IP and streaming sources should you need to mix in third party streams.


THE TIPPING POINT
It’s an all in one solution that lets you mix, add captions and stream to multiple simultaneous destinations. For a number of years now the talk has all been about the rise of streaming platforms as the preferred method to reach viewers, and we are now seeing what we believe to be the tipping point, because with the advances we have seen (as discussed above) in technology, quality does not have to be compromised for pristine broadcast quality material via the web.
We have only really touched the tip of the Iceberg with regards to the conversations we could have about this area and our experts in Tyrell are always at their happiest when having a good technical talk about live production scenarios. Every time we think we’ve seen it all we are presented with a new problem to solve, so please feel free to contact us to discuss any aspects of how perhaps we could help you.

www.tyrellcct.com


This article is also available in the July edition of Broadcast Film & Video. Available here.