In news announced shortly before the festive holidays, Broadcast Solutions has supplied a 16 UHD-camera OB van to St. Petersburg-based broadcasting company City TV-Radio Agency JSC. The new truck is one of the first and largest UHD OB vehicles in Russia, and will enable the St. Petersburg TV channel to deliver coverage of large cultural, political and social occasions.
For a lot of the events, City TV-Radio Agency JSC will produce international feeds or federal coverage to be broadcast to the whole country. St. Petersburg City TV-Radio Agency works with various technology providers to achieve production capacities of up to 5 large OB vans. With the new OB van, named Neva, the company becomes even more flexible and can, of course, now produce in UHD.
Ilya Osichev, CTO at City TV-Radio Agency JSC, comments: “Our company and our team have a lot of experience in large and complex live productions, and a deep understanding of workflows and processes inside an OB van. From the starting point, we had a strong opinion and a lot of expectations, and we strongly believed that only a very experienced company could match our requirements for building a new OB van. And, of course, UHD is still a pretty special format currently.”
The OB van comes as a full trailer with two extensions and offers 20 workplaces. The vehicle’s infrastructure and signal workflow are designed for having signals coming in from external inputs through fibre or tel-co lines from different locations in St. Petersburg to join the main cameras. Moreover, additional outputs are designed to feed large LED screens with the programme produced by a second vision mixer panel.
In terms of specific solutions, City TV-Radio Agency and Broadcast Solutions have specified Grass Valley UHD-native LDX86N cameras as well as the Grass Valley Sirius router and Kahuna vision mixers. Other equipment includes the Riedel Artist intercom system, IHSE KVM solutions, and a Calrec Summa audio console and audio matrix. Moreover, with the use of the hi human interface in this truck, Broadcast Solutions has added a further high-profile OB van to the roster of hi-enabled projects.
Broadcast Solutions COO Wladislaw Grabowski remarked: “We are thrilled, once again, to deliver a large OB van to Russia. Over the years we have developed a strong relationship with the Russian broadcast community that trusts in our expertise and our solutions. City TV-Radio Agency JSC is a very professional production house, and it makes us even prouder that we could convince them to use our in-house developed control system, hi human interface, in their new premier production vehicle.”