Veteran sports production company Lyon Video, in Columbus, OH, has completed work on its new 14,500sq-ft offices, service and storage facility to facilitate better maintenance and equipment integration on its fleet of trucks, which includes 11 full-size mobile rigs and five "B" units.
Since the new building has become operational in 2010, the company has completed most of its installation projects in half the time it previously took. It includes four drive-through bays and storage racks for parts and other gear, and has been used thus far to build its support trailers ("B" units). It could be used for larger "A" trucks in the future.
"We are to the point where we have to keep an inventory of cable and other parts, and we're doing a lot of integration work ourselves, so we needed a place of our own that could better serve our maintenance department," said Chad Snyder, account manager at Lyon Video. "It's also nice for the staff to be inside and not out in the weather."
The building is located on a new 5-acre site, about 5mi from its previous location where it was for 20 years. It was designed from the ground up to accommodate the building of trucks, with enough electricity to power eight mobile units at once. It also provides plenty of space to set up and test equipment, and assemble systems before they are implemented onto a truck.
The facility was used to integrate a new B unit (Lyon B-5 with expanding side) to accompany the company's latest HD (3Gb/s 1080p60 infrastructure) production truck, the 53ft MU-11, complete with 14 Grass Valley LDK 8000 Elite HD cameras (wired for 24 in triax and fiber), Fujinon HD lenses, a Grass Valley Kayenne video production switcher, 492 x 746 Evertz EQX 3G HD-SDI router with VIP 32 monitoring system, Chyron Duet HyperX3 graphics system, and a Calrec Apollo audio mixing console (one of the first and largest in the U.S.). The truck is now on the road producing live telecasts for ESPN and others.
MU-11 is also 3-D ready, with the capability to take a simultaneous 3-D stream (left eye, right eye) and display it as a converged signal on all of the monitors in the truck.
"We really wanted to have a place where the staff could maintain and test equipment in a single location," Snyder said. "We've now completed our newest B unit in here, which was done in two weeks."
The facility also helps the company save on housing and other costs associated with building its vehicles offsite. The company's large trucks are largely still built with the help of other companies; the chassis are fabricated at Gerling and Associates, and equipment installation/design work is done at nearby system integrator Bennett Systems.
