SANTA CLARITA, Calif.—Mobile TV production facilities provider Game Creek Video is nearing completion of its fifth 4K UHD mobile unit within the past 12 months equipped with Riedel Communications’ IP gateways for inter-truck connectivity, Riedel has announced.
Game Creek video is using the Riedel MediorNet FusioN standalone IP converters to drive SMPTE ST 2110-based signal processing for each production vehicle.
The 53-foot-long expandable units are entirely IP-based facilities. Game Creek Video rolled out the first two production units, Bravo and Columbia, in late 2019. They were followed this year by Gridiron A and B and Celtic. Gotham is currently being completed.
Fox Sports will use Bravo and Gridiron for NFL and college football coverage, while CBS Sports has reserved Columbia and Celtic for its NFL and college basketball broadcasts. MSG Networks will use Gotham for its New York Rangers hockey and New York Knicks basketball coverage.
"With Bravo, we were taking a significant new direction in our facility design by trying to achieve full IP workflows within the footprint of a single mobile unit,” said Game Creek Video Engineering Project Manager Keith Martin.
“Naturally, that meant finding robust and effective solutions that could also run as cool as possible and meet the space constraints and weight restrictions of a 53-foot truck," he said.
“Not only do the Riedel MediorNet devices check all of those boxes, but as native IP and 2110 solutions they allow us to maximize all of the benefits of IP operations, including lower cost per path, reduced setup time, connectivity with our legacy assets and overall simplicity of deployment.”
The T2T interface of MediorNet creates seamless, vendor-agnostic connectivity between the new trucks and Game Creek Video’s legacy SDI-based fleet, thereby eliminating the need to convert SDI signals from electrical copper to optical fiber and back again, Riedel said.
Using a 25-gigabit Ethernet interface, the FusioN gateways can transport signals on the SMPTE ST 2110 network and then output them as CWDM-wavelength (coarse wavelength division multiplexing) SDI directly to legacy equipment in a baseband truck.
“The ability to not only interconnect any of our 2110-based facilities with each other, but with any of our traditional baseband SDI mobile facilities, brings incredible flexibility to each production and allows us to maximize the investment in our entire fleet of vehicles,” said Martin.
“But the main reason we leaned heavily into Riedel for the T2T interface is the incredible versatility of the solution. In a single box, we have a complete solution for handling SDI, CWDM wavelength and the other complexities of the deployment.”
More information is available on the Riedel and Game Creek Video websites.
