Europe's largest 4K HDR OB truck prepares to start its working life in Belfast By Fergal Ringrose, Editorial Director, Europe
Wednesday, August 28, 2019 - 15:09
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TVN Mobile Production's new top-end TVN- 6 truck, built in partnership with Sony, will go into production on 9 September for the Northern Ireland v Germany UEFA EURO qualifier in Belfast. It will be used for complex UHD, HD and mixed productions and is optimised for all SDR and HDR production standards.
The layout of the vehicle, described by Sony Professional Solutions Europe as Europe's largest 4K HDR OB truck', provides two identical large production galleries, available for different clients, allowing them to simultaneously produce two large-scale live productions from one truck with 13 positions in each area and identical monitor walls. This is facilitated by a double-expanding coach design throughout the full vehicle length.
The room design also allows better communication between production staff, while providing 120 square meters of interior space, including 41 comfortable pre-configurable workstations when combined with its supporting tender.
Underpinning the new OB truck are two Sony XVS-8000 multi-format video switchers, featuring a total of ten native M/E's in UHD and up to 40 M/E's in HD, enabling simultaneous 4K and HD operation. The camera control room of the new vehicle accommodates up to 30 HDC-4300 UHD cameras, while Sony BVM-X300 4K OLED reference monitors offer image reproduction in the shading area.
The two independent control rooms each have 13 workstations. Dolby Atmos or 5.1 audio is available via a Lawo-driven audio area, and the truck can simulcast up to four main feeds and parallel hybrid productions in UHD and HD, HDR and SDR. Set and foreign connections over fibre are provided with a Riedel Mediornet network.
SVG Europe spoke with TVN managing director Markus Osthaus about the launch of the new truck, and we first asked him if the company's new vehicle will be displayed at IBC in Amsterdam.
No, because it will replace one of our existing OB vans so already has a lot of work to do. The project builders did ask us if we could attend at IBC, but we knew it would not be possible. OB2 is being retired, and OB6 has to go straight into Bundesliga. But actually the first production will be in Belfast, for the Northern Ireland v Germany UEFA EURO qualifier on 9 September for RTL. We start with a pretty big one!
Some OB providers are saying the days of building big trucks are over due to remote production and fibre connectivity. But I'm guessing you will say that is not the case?
If I did I would be silly! For small, cost-sensitive and cost-effective productions, you can definitely do these with remote production already. But for premium productions, I think that for at least the next 7-10 years you will still need big OB vans because the customer wants to be on-site. I still believe that when we are doing sports and concerts it is about emotion, and it's always great to have the director on-site so he or she can feel what it's all about.
For the next number of years there are enough big events and we have positioned ourselves as a premium supplier for big OB vans. In ten years, maybe [remote production], when we are talking about 5G and all that kind of stuff. But do we know anyone now who would say as a customer, OK, we can do the Champions League Final as a remote production'. Yes from the technical side you can do it, but in terms of reliability and production safety, I don't know any customer like this.
OB6 could be viewed as two trucks rather than one, due to the identical production control rooms. The thinking there is to facilitate different feeds at complex events?
Even in Bundesliga on Saturday nights, you always have two customers - at least. You will have Sportcast for the match signal, and Sky for the national signal. It's always a big discussion, which signal is more complex and which customer has the right to be in production area 1 and which in production area 2.
Now that's over: we have two equal extra-large production areas, two galleries - and they are blue and
Interior image of the truck, showing the mirrored production areas with identical monitor walls
red so there's no discussion about which customer is more important. We do a lot of production like this where you have the national signal and the international feed. That was the thinking behind the design: we wanted the same perfect production conditions for both customers.
I don't know of any other truck like this. When I first saw the design I thought wow, is this possible?' Let's think about it. Then we thought OK, this is a totally new way'. But we tried it and now we have reached our goals. What was also very important when we talked to the project builders was that we also wanted the perfect conditions in communication; we don't want the situation where our customers are sitting in one room and we can't see them.
So when you look at the design, the audio engineer and the production engineer have full view to all customers in both production galleries. They can look in the face of the director. This was very important for us: we cannot only hear, over the intercom, but we can also see the customer so we can act and not only react.
In the production galleries there are SonoVTS monitors: SonoVTS were the only company that could provide us with 49-inch UHD-HDR monitors. There was no other manufacturer on the market for these. In the shading areas there are reference-class 4K HDR monitors from Sony.
The key companies behind the build were head of design Eddy Brants and project manager Steven Deschaeck from project builders.eu; the coach builders Carrosserie Akkermans; and Sony, who did the system integ
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Europe's largest 4K HDR OB truck prepares to start its working life in Belfast By Fergal Ringrose, Editorial Director, Europe 
