We’ve seen a production system in a smart car (NewTek TriCaster) but a Japanese e-learning company called KiBAN International can lay claim to one of the smallest road-worthy mobile production vehicles ever.
The company has packed a Blackmagic Design ATEM Television Studio video production switcher, HyperDeck Studio Pro solid-state recorder and SmartView Duo (a two-screen monitoring system) into the back of a HONDA Gyro Canopy trike and dubbed it “The Panda Bird.” The 6 RU mobile broadcast trike was shown publicly for the first time at the recent Educational IT Solution Expo (EDIX) in Tokyo.
As part of KiBAN International’s work to connect different communities, the company uses video and Internet streaming from often hard to reach locations. That’s why it saw the need for a highly mobile broadcasting system that could go anywhere, especially to places inaccessible to larger OB vans.
The Panda Bird features the capability to perform full multi-camera HD productions as well as H.264 (MPEG-4) encoding for Internet streaming in a single rack unit. Two Sony HD cameras are connected wirelessly to the ATEM switcher, with H.264 files encoded using ATEM Television streamed live using technology from Ustream. The system is removable from the trike for inside use, and works with a 12V power supply so that it can also run on external batteries.
KiBAN added HyperDeck Studio to the trike for a rack mount SSD-based deck with dual slots for recording of uncompressed or compressed (DNxHD or ProRes) images. With the SmartView Duo, the trike can include two large independent eight-inch LCD screens in a compact rack mount design, and view SD, HD and 3Gb/s SDI video standards. This allows the operators to work with any types of video signal.
