LITTLE ROCK, ARK.—For 23 years, Jones Mobile Television has provided a range of video production services to national sports, corporate, and entertainment clients. We takes pride in offering the latest technologies, expertise and customer service for maximum success on every production.
Our flagship mobile production unit is VisionHD, a 51-foot, three-deck, high-def expanding trailer with 15 separate production positions and equipped with eight Sony HDC2400L HD cameras.
Jones Mobile Television installed Calrec’s Summa digital mixing console to upgrade its Vision HD truck to 5.1 surround sound.BIG UPGRADE IN SMALL PACKAGE
During a retrofit for VisionHD earlier this year, we went from analog stereo to 5.1 surround production by replacing the truck’s original-equipment audio desk with a new Calrec Audio Summa digital mixing console. Summa produces broadcast audio in a smaller footprint and with fewer resources than Calrec’s larger Apollo and Artemis consoles. Our Summa supports 128 channels with full redundancy, and Calrec’s Bluefin2 FPGA technology, designed at the outset for surround operation, gives Jones Mobile comprehensive 5.1 mixing capabilities.
Space is always an issue in a mobile unit, but the Summa fits perfectly. While the Hydra2 console provides the same integral routing control as Apollo and Artemis, Summa offers a smaller control surface and a highly intuitive, 17-inch multitouch screen inspired by tablet technology. With this interface, our crew can navigate the system using established finger gestures, simplifying even complex workflow tasks such as creating mix-minus feeds.
At first, our engineers couldn’t believe such a compact desk could be robust enough to support a high-powered live HD production. But one show was all it took to win them over. The Summa console was installed in May and was first used for coverage of the COPA America soccer quarterfinal and semi-final matches in Houston.
The desk continues to work beautifully and gives us many more capabilities than we had previously; the Hydra2 router allows us to interface directly with digital devices on the truck, as well as using our core video router’s embedders and de-embedders with the Summa for an expanded ability and amount of I/O. We can provide much more complex configurations of the truck’s equipment, which we can now change per show. The console’s various analog and digital I/O options—in particular the MADI interfaces—have made it easier to take advantage of all of Calrec’s industrial- strength routing functionality.
CREATING OPTIONS
The Summa was my first experience with Calrec products, and it didn’t take long to see why Calrec is known as the “gold standard” for audio mixing in TV production trucks. The beauty of the Summa is it can handle productions of virtually every complexity in an impressively small form factor. With its 5.1 capabilities, the Summa has opened up a world of business for our company; a client looking to do 5.1 shows hired us because we installed the Summa.
With Summa, Jones Mobile Television is taking its business to the next level.
Christopher Duty has more than two decades in broadcast. He has been with Jones Mobile Television for a year, and handles designs, installations, and day to day operation of the VisionHD unit. He can be contacted atcduty@jmtv.comor by calling him at 901-568-0026.
For more information, please visitwww.calrec.comor call 661-877-9775.
