Bexel equipment packages helped a variety of broadcasters and production companies deliver the Olympics to viewers around the world.
Equipment rental company Bexel just finished a stellar three weeks in Turin, Italy, where its equipment packages helped a variety of broadcasters and production companies deliver the Olympics to viewers around the world. The company also lent its technical expertise and engineering support to clients in Turin, Italy. Most of the native footage captured during the two-week event was acquired and produced in PAL standard- and high-definition television formats, then converted to NTSC SD/HD for the United States.
Craig Schiller, director of Bexel Broadcast Services, said most of the equipment they supplied was flown-in over a 60-day period prior to the games. A few Bexel engineers remained on-site throughout the games to provide technical support for Bexel’s customers.
For the duration of the Games, the majority of the equipment was installed within the International Broadcast Center (IBC), although some gear was also used on or adjacent to mobile trucks spread out across the different sporting venues. The IBC provided SD and HD feeds to the world from virtually every Olympic venue. To help capture the action of the Torino Games in HDTV, (nearly 90 percent of the Olympic content this year was acquired and produced in HDTV, the most ever for an Olympics), the equipment supplied by Bexel included fiber-optic transmission gear, digital disk recorders, telestrators, shotgun mics, audio mixers and NLE equipment, including edit controllers, for the edit rooms set up inside the IBC.
Some of the equipment was provided by Bexel in a variety of turnkey flyaway kits and highly portable systems that were configured and tested in the United States before going to Italy. Working with Communitek Video Systems, Bexel engineers set up a conversion network capable of converting the video and audio in real-time using a Brick House Video Proteus standards converter. Twelve Proteus standards converters were used to convert footage live from Italy’s native PAL format to America’s NTSC. Proteus is a 4-field, 4-line motion adaptive unit with multi-format inputs and outputs.
