The For-A FA-9100ALLENTOWN, PA.
New Century Productions is a full service remote video production company and provides mobile production units for broadcast and corporate clients. NCP was founded in 1984 and we've worked with many national and regional broadcasters in producing live sports event coverage. We have 12 mobile production units in our fleet that range in size and capability.
We recently launched our newest HD truck—the NCP XI. It's designed to operate as a general purpose sports production truck, and can host the largest shows our clients throw at us, while remaining nimble enough to operate "light," that is, running without a "B" unit and producing single day set-shoot-strike events.
ANYTHING TO ANYTHING
To meet this challenge we needed to equip the truck with the greatest possible I/O capacity in order to meet the widely disparate requirements of our clients. To be successful, we have to be able to accommodate large numbers of feeds in any format that might come along. To do this we required the video equivalent of a "Swiss Army knife," something that could take either analog composite video, SDI or HD-SDI (in either 720p or 1080i), along with either analog or AES audio, then process the signal and feed it out in virtually any format. Some clients will require nothing more than a frame synchronizer, while others need much more capability, including special audio processing.
And as if this wasn't daunting enough, we also needed handles for altering video and audio levels, as well as color correction controls. And in keeping within tight space limitations in a truck environment, this processor had to be contained within a single rack package and be equipped with a remote control that could handle multiple units. In the end, it was the color correction that pushed us to the For-A FA-9100 frame synchronizer.
For years, For-A has been the gold standard by which other products are judged when it came to color correction. Having a fully functional color corrector, complete with white, black, gamma and clip correction is indispensable in a multipurpose truck.
SHARED CAMERAS ARE NO PROBLEM
When our truck is covering an event for a visiting team, arena space limitations often require us to take a feed from the home team's game camera, rather than setting up our own. Even in situations where the home feed is the same HD format we typically find significant differences in the look of the shared camera and need a color corrector to match the outboard camera to ours. The For-A FA-9100 lets us do this with ease.
This handy unit can be literally "all things to all people." It provides us with an affordable HD-capable signal processor with functionality that goes way beyond what you'd find in a typical frame synchronizer and converter.
We've found no other device that matches For-A's capabilities at its price point. It's particularly well-suited to the challenges of today's multiformat mobile production environment. The unit sets up fast and is easy to use. Our client base is very pleased with the level of readiness we bring to any production. Our For-A's FA-9100s help us stay ready to do our job in a constantly changing environment.
Mike Mundt is the chief engineer at New Century Productions, a wholly owned subsidiary of NEP Broadcasting. He may be contacted atmundt@ncpvideo.com.
For more information, contact For-A at 201-944-1120 or visitwww.for-a.com.
