It’s funny how the lessons you learn in one part of your life often apply in others.
Such was the case with the pandemic that shut down so much of what I was doing in the corporate AV world as businesses adopted a strategy that sent employees home to work remotely to comply with social distancing recommendations from health authorities.
Overnight about 99% of what I was doing—mostly corporate AV services for gatherings in ballrooms—dried up. Looking around, I vowed that never again would I put all of my eggs in the same basket.
I wanted to create something that did not pigeonhole me in a single market niche that could be shuttered by a pandemic or any other unforeseen calamity. To the best of my ability, I would pursue a business strategy that emphasized flexibility so if one sector went down, I would have others to buoy me.
To that end, I founded and serve as president of three companies, Pittman Media Group, which focuses on AV production and integration as well as being the parent company of CINELIVE. CINELIVE is my OB mobile production company with a flagship 53-foot mobile unit serving hybrid or cinematic multi-cam and traditional live broadcast clients. My third company, which is unrelated to the first two, focuses on High-Density Ultra-Pure LED displays for video broadcast control rooms and critical control rooms in other industries.
Next-Level Flexibility
As I thought about how best to build an OB unit, I quickly realized that placing an emphasis on flexibility in its technical design, similar to my overall business north star, made perfect sense.
I selected an integrated media processing solution, aka a Ross Video Ultrix platform, in combination with Ross openGear-based modular-based processing to address multiple video production functions, such as audio and video routing, frame synchronization, multiview, production switching and other workflow essentials, in a single system.
Rather than relying on racks full of single-purpose technology and dealing with the footprint required for all of those racks and equipment, higher cooling loads and the increased complexity and weight of the cabling that would be necessary, the integrated processing available via Software Defined Production Engine blades and some supporting modular processing proved to be a far more elegant approach that could easily meet production requirements that vary from client to client and show to show.
Compared to OB units with traditional designs, CINELIVE devoted fewer equipment racks to video—about two-and-a-half, providing the flexibility to devote several more feet of truck space to audio, which runs one of the finest Dolby Atmos 5.1.4 audio suites ever built into an OB unit.
In this respect, flexibility equals scalability. Having additional free rack space means the unit can scale with new technology to enable new or expanded production requirements and associated workflows. Even more importantly, the fact the FPGA used to power our integrated media processing solution has additional processing headroom means the solution itself can also scale as new software revisions enable additional production capabilities to meet the needs of customers.
Besides space, this approach cuts weight by about 5,000 pounds when compared to a comparable traditional OB vehicle, meaning our CINELIVE OB vehicle is never even close to our 80,000-pound weight limit.
Other Benefits of Flexibility
There are several other important benefits of having such a flexible integrated signal processing solution. Adapting workflows is one example. No two productions are ever the same. As a result, tally identification of camera sources changes from production to production. Thanks to the flexibility built into our integrated system and our tally management system, which it supports, we can, for example, assign camera signals to various CCU inputs and all accompanying tally information, such as signal source name, automatically follows.
Having the flexibility to add new capabilities to our integrated media processing system as they become available also offers the potential to open up new monetization opportunities. One example is the addition of true 4K multiviewing support, which will give us the opportunity to upcharge our highest-end clients for this capability if we decide to do so.
Whether it’s the ability to add new capabilities to CINELIVE without major hardware additions, the chance to monetize new production capabilities, the means to make easy workflow modifications or the freedom to leverage more rack space, choosing to base our mobile unit on an integrated media processing system is delivering the flexibility needed to be competitive and keep clients happy for the foreseeable future.
As I learned coming out of the pandemic, building a business ethos around having the flexibility to adjust to come what may is also a recipe for success when it comes CINELIVE.
(Editor’s Note: Zack Pittman deployed a Ross Video Hyperconverged Ultrix integrated processing solution with Ross Acuity production switcher capability and a Ross Video openGear modular media processing solution to enhance production capabilities as required.)
More information is available in the Ross Video “Why Flexibility is Essential for Broadcast and Live Production Success” white paper and “CINELIVE Builds a Future with Ross” case study.
