SALT LAKE CITY—Cornerstone AV is a wide-ranging event production company that covers many services, including scenic development, content management and live-event execution. In addition to delivering the in-house experience, our live-event work often includes a broadcast element for streaming to external audiences.
Many of us came to Cornerstone with a broadcast television background. Those experiences inspired us to build a broadcast-style truck to support our live-event work. We like to say that we brought everything we learned from the TV world into the live-event world, including the core technologies used in studio facilities today.
Those technologies include several products from MultiDyne—the company shares our vision of applying broadcast-quality performance to the live event space, and its products exist comfortably in both worlds. MultiDyne also allows us to operate more efficiently by providing compact and problem-solving solutions that can be rapidly deployed, reducing our setup process by a significant margin.
FiberSaver Remapping
MultiDyne’s FiberSaver is one product that consistently pays dividends. As a digital multiplexer, its main benefit is to overcome the challenge of moving a multitude of signals over a finite number of fibers. It also provides the convenience of wavelength remapping. This means the unit’s wavelength-agnostic inputs can accept and multiplex digital optical signals from a variety of sources, move them over a common fiber strand at different wavelength rates and electronically reclock each signal to the appropriate standard of 1,310 nanometers required at the output. As opposed to passive reclocking that would be required without FiberSaver, its electronic reclocking reliably ensures robust and fresh signals at every output.
The FiberSaver’s one rack-unit design fits comfortably on our truck and is positioned just below our Ross Ultrix router. The Ultrix moves up to 24 signals to FiberSaver over a 1-foot single-mode fiber jumper, which allows us to maintain 100% fiber purity through the chain. The inclusion of BNC connections allows us to move SDI signals over copper as warranted alongside the optical signals moving over fiber. The unit’s bidirectionality supports 12 return feeds, which allows us to monitor graphics, prompter, scheduling and cueing from FOH.
MultiDyne can also customize solutions to support other needs at Cornerstone AV. That includes the VB Series “Build a Box” solution, which MultiDyne builds to specification to support any signal transport combination over fiber. These are portable solutions that we can throw down anywhere to carry video and ethernet signals through to the destination. We often use them in a last-mile scenario, taking signals in from FiberSaver and moving them to our projectors.
SMPTE-HUT
We are also fans of the SMPTE-HUT Series as it brings simplicity to those of us in a hybrid world. More specifically, the SMPTE-HUT is a universal camera transceiver that removes the limitations that come with hybrid fiber and copper cabling. The HUT device in our drive rack is powered through a TAC-12 single-mode fiber cable. A typical application will power long-lens cameras positioned at front of house or at each side of stage, which would place the drive rack behind the stage. In either scenario, there is a drastic reduction in cable length—often up to 50 feet—as we can feed the drive rack over fiber.
Consider the alternative of requiring separate 700-foot cable runs for each feed; the hours across setup and breakdown times can quickly add up. With the SMPTE-HUT, we reduce at least several hours of labor before and after the event. The same benefit applies to FiberSaver, which also solves the problems of limited space for, or availability of, more than one or two fiber runs. Collectively, all of our MultiDyne products simplify the challenges of operating in a hybrid universe.
More information is available at www.multidyne.com.
