Veteran mobile production company NEP Broadcasting is using several SDI-over-fiber transport systems from Studio Technologies (www.studio-tech.com) to distribute camera signals from the field to its remote trucks covering the NBC's "Sunday Night Football" NFL telecasts.
NEP Broadcasting provides production services for live sports and entertainment applications and is using the Model 400 SDI-over-Fiber Transport in a second "B" production truck covering the national broadcasts.
The equipment was added to the production truck for the games due to the space restrictions within existing truck compounds, NEP Broadcasting said. While HD video has an effective transport link of about 300ft on copper (coaxial cable), NEP needed to go several thousand feet away from its main production truck. The only option was optical fiber. The company selected the Model 400 to serve as the video interconnect backbone for this additional truck
NEP's trailer provides the technology that generates the virtual signage, lines and images that float on the field. It also handles the transport for all of the wireless and RF cameras between where they are received, processed and handed off to the main truck. The trailer also houses all the transmission hardware to get the signal back to the broadcaster. Reliability was extremely important because every camera and the outbound transmission path flowed through this fiber backbone.
The Model 400 SDI-Over-Fiber Transport System is a high-performance, cost-effective, rack-mount system for distributing digital video signals over short and medium distances. The system is compatible with all common broadcast serial digital video formats and is suitable for use in remote trucks, live-event video distribution and fixed links associated with broadcast and production facilities.
The Series 400 offers 12 format-independent SDI data paths over four single-mode optical fibers supporting 3G (SMPTE 424M), HD (SMPTE 292), and SD (SMPTE 259M) SDI, as well as DVB-ASI. Fiber transport is based on the SMPTE 297 standard.
