ST. PETERSBURG, Fla.—Thunder City Productions, a design and installation company here, incorporated key production technology from Evertz, as well as solutions from Sony and Calrec, into a mobile production unit (MPU) for Florida Atlantic University used for live content broadcast on ESPN+.
The BOLT Series MPU, launched last year, is available as a 16-, 24- or 32-foot unit. Customers can select a predesigned floor plan, a preintegrated unit or a truck specifically designed and built for them.
“BOLT came about because many of our clients were looking for smaller production vehicles that were more cost-effective to build and run, and easier to transport around the country,” production designer and Thunder City Pro CEO Justin Stancil said. “As very few companies were addressing this market, we decided to launch BOLT with a view to improving on what was already out there.”
FAU chose a 32-foot trailer and Thunder City Pro—in conjunction with its production company, Digital Wave Productions—specified, ordered and installed the equipment. FAU uses the production truck to televise its sports teams’ away games and to generate revenue through hire. It also is used to teach students enrolled in FAU’s Multimedia and Production programs.
The unit is now being used to capture content across several sports, including baseball, soccer and basketball.
“We worked closely with FAU to ensure that the MPU met FAU requirements and ESPN+’s technical specifications,” he said. “FAU wanted five cameras, seating and workstations for up to 10 people and high-quality, industry-standard equipment so that students could train on technology they will find in the real world. We also had to make sure that the unit was 3G 1080p and 4K/HDR-ready for the future.”
Evertz supplied key technology for FAU’s new mobile unit, including a DreamCatcher DC-ONE system with two DC-RCP10 controllers, a NEXX 64 x 64 embedding and de-embedding 12G-SDI router controlled by MAGNUM-OS and an 5700MSC-IP Grand Master clock and video sync generator.
“The DreamCatcher DC-ONE is industry-standard for live shows at this level,” Stancil said. “I am very accustomed to working with DreamCatcher and the Evertz MAGNUM orchestration platform, to the point where I refuse to use anything else.”
The Evertz DC-ONE is an 8-channel replay system with 7.68 TB of continuous loop recording that supports 720p, 1080i, and 1080p video formats. Features include slow-motion replay, live steaming between networked systems, clip creation, clip naming, metadata tagging, playlist creation and editing, audio editing, internal audio routing, content import and export, content transcoding and searching and one-touch zooming, the company said.
The university’s MPU is equipped with on-board Network Attached Storage (NAS). Because this can be mounted on the DC-ONE as a drive, operators can quickly import and export clips and graphics, Evertz said.
“Being able to access pre-pro elements, such as clips and graphics via the NAS, without having to mark in and out or clip everything saves so much time,” Stancil said. “It is a very precise, self-sustaining system, and its ability to access the NAS and all other devices that are connected to it was super important to us.”
The Evertz NEXX router on the trailer operates with MAGNUM-OS orchestration software. It is capable of embedding and de-embedding on every input, handling Multichannel Audio Digital Interface (MADI) inputs and outputs, generating multiviewers and supporting processing functions such as frame syncing and format conversion, Evertz said.
“The density was more than twice that of other routers we were considering,” Stancil said. “We can have four multiviewers per card, and we don’t lose critical I/O resources by having to reinsert multiviewers. We can route any multiview in the router to any output we want.”
FAU’s MPU is also equipped with an Evertz 5700MSC-IP Grand Master clock and video sync generator, which has the GPS component needed to synchronize the unit’s SMPTE ST 2110 audio console, Evertz said.
