Panasonic to televise Monday Night Football games in high definition. While it has since been retired from MNF service, the NFL is still very much a part of the truck’s service. For the latest NFL season, we were contracted by CBS Sports to provide Platinum HD for their crew to use in airing their “B-level” games, which have the second-highest priority of all the games on that day’s schedule.
Also, see the SVG interview with Dave Greany.
A 53-foot triple-expanding high definition unit, Corplex’s Platinum HD is equipped with 12 Ikegami HDK79/790-series HD cameras that are SMPTE fiber-equipped with hybrid optical fiber/wire interfaces. While the cameras are top quality, most football stadiums and other facilities aren’t pre-wired with SMPTE cabling. Stringing SMPTE cable at these installations would require a huge effort with a great amount of time and money expended. It would also be risky, because if one of the specialized SMPTE cables were to be damaged during installation, it couldn’t be repaired in the field.
Nearly every facility however is already wired with triax cable, which has been the standard remote camera cable for years. Many more have recently installed single-mode fiber, which better supports the high-quality signals that are necessary in professional football broadcasts. Single-mode fiber as opposed to SMPTE Hybrid is inexpensive and easy to use in the field. What we needed was a solution that would allow us to utilize the existing single-mode fiber installations with our Ikegami SMPTE-hybrid cameras.
We found the answer in Telecast’s SHED family of products. An acronym for SMPTE Hybrid Elimination Device, the Telecast system consists of two adapters, the SHED and the HDX. These adapters allow the camera and base station to communicate seamlessly on two ordinary single-mode fibers while maintaining a pure optical path from camera head to mobile unit so that the highest-quality signals originated by our Ikegami cameras will remain pristine. The SHED, used at the mobile unit end, allows users to convert signals from SMPTE hybrid wire/fiber cables with Lemo connectors to standard single-mode fiber and, in our case, ST fiber connectors.
The HDX units used at the camera end provide power to the cameras. At times we have the ability to use local power from an AC supply or camera battery, but the most common and preferred method is to power through an HDX box, which is a powered version of the passive SHED adapters. An HDX unit can power a camera through up to a kilometer of hybrid cable. A new feature that Telecast will be adding to our SHED units is the ability to turn off the HDX boxes remotely, which will be convenient because when we power down the CCU we can also shut down the cameras from the mobile unit.
That HDX remote shut-down feature is one that we requested from Telecast, and they responded with the improvement quickly. Telecast’s support has been wonderful, and the company continues to upgrade and enhance its SHED family. We own five complete sets, and the reliability of the devices has been excellent. CBS often augments our collection with some of their own, and we’ve had up to 10 sets in the field at one time.
In February, we used our Platinum HD truck with the SHED units at the International Auto Show in Chicago. This particular job would not have been feasible without the SHED/HDX and the Telecast Adder system. The Auto show this year spanned both the north and south halls at Chicago’s mammoth McCormick Place Convention Center. The only connectivity between the two halls was dark fiber.
At the mobile unit we started with SMPTE fiber and DT-12s. We then transitioned to single-mode fiber with the SHED for our cameras and a Telecast Adder system for audio and communications. In the north hall, we broke out with the HDX into a Ikegami Mongoose (which converts SMPTE to triax), thus utilizing triax that we had run earlier in the month, which – if damaged – could be field repaired. The audio used the other end of the Adder system to tie to the dry-pairs run from each position. Telecast’s innovative products make executing remote television not only easier but in many cases possible in places where technical or budgetary limitations had previously prohibited.
We’re thrilled with how Telecast’s SHED adapters have helped to eliminate a lot of the time, energy and expense that would have been required to use SMPTE hybrid cabling with our mobile truck’s equipment instead of a facility’s pre-installed wiring systems, whether single-mode fiber, triaxial cable, or a combination of the two. Telecast’s excellent customer support and willingness to continually improve upon its technologies has given us complete confidence in them, and we look forward to using SHED and HDX units at our many and varied events to come.
Top of Page
102 Grove Street