Page 16 - IP Audio for TV Production And Beyond

MIX FROM HOME
The days of schlepping tons of equipment around to various spor ng venues are numbered, along with the associated travel and sta ng issues, such as delayed ights, room cancella ons, and all the rest that happen as a ma er of rou ne during a remote broadcast.
Fiber op c and other high-speed communica on links
can now bring it all to your home studio where your produc on team can mix the game and get it out for broadcast almost as fast as it happens. No big anvil cases. No grumpy eld engineers. Well, that last part isn’t en rely true – but the cost savings of mixing remote games from home certainly is.
With mixing taking place at home in a single loca on, there are fewer boxes to buy and get banged up out in the eld. You’ll need microphones and cameras, of course. And, someone has to s ll go out and capture the ac on. But it’s a smaller, more manageable opera on, which is why sports broadcasters are moving to this work ow model.
Collegiate sports network IMG World, for example, has been using the at-home model for some me to bring live coverage to 2,200 radio a liates. On any given Saturday, it transports live audio from 40-plus ballparks and elds to its centralized studio in Winston-Salem, NC, where it does all the nal produc on using WheatNet-IP mixing consoles and audio networking (read Spor ng IP Audio).
WheatNet-IP is an AES67 compa ble IP audio network made up of I/O and specialty BLADEs combining
audio mixing, rou ng, and controlling into one studio environment – whether in one loca on or in mul ple loca ons. Specialty HD/SDI BLADEs, for example, retrieve SDI audio directly from the camera, de-embedding it and sending it home as discrete audio.
To set up a WAN between the home studio and the remote venue, systems such as Artel’s In nityLink IL6000 provide the media transport with WheatNet-IP audio networking units and Ethernet switches on each end to extend work ows across the WAN. The network itself can serve as an IFB backbone that is routable by simply triggering crosspoints in the network – with zero latency between talent and crew in the eld.
Meanwhile, at the home studio (or anywhere in the network) an IP audio control surface such as the Wheatstone IP-64, Dimension Three Touch, LXE or Series Four, can turn mics on, control levels, and trigger IFB remotely.
And because most IP audio networks are now AES67 compa ble, WheatNet-IP included, it’s a rela vely small ma er to transport audio from, say, a live sound group that might have one network pla orm (such as a WheatNet-IP system) and a broadcast truck that has another (such as Dante).
You can read more about the at-home work ow and how we set up a IP audio WAN in just a few hours.
Just CLICK HERE.l
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