Designed primarily to capture sporting and cultural events, the new facility – the second completely HD-equipped vehicle in Czech TV’s fleet – is based on a 26-ton Man chassis with a single expanding side.
The design, integration and delivery of the 12 metre-long, four metre-high vehicle was overseen by Visual Unity. The company’s brief stipulated that the new vehicle should be compatible with Czech TV’s existing systems and interfaces, while also providing the high standards and effective design required to tackle demanding video and audio productions.
Under the direction of project leader Tomas Vesely, the new vehicle was coach-built in the UK by Spectra Engineering and engineered together with Megahertz. Once this part of the project was completed, the truck was driven to Visual Unity so that the engineering team could finish the custom installation.
“The most demanding stage of the project was the initial layout design, which we worked on very closely with the customer,” explained Vesely. “We needed to install a lot of equipment, while at the same time provide an efficient, ergonomic operational space for the crew, including a comfortable 5.1 surround sound suite for audio mixing. Achieving this required some thought, given the fixed size of the 12 metre chassis. Another issue we had to resolve was incorporating several different heating systems, which are needed because Czech TV plans to use the truck extensively for winter sports events. The final systems integration challenge was integrating LSB’s VSM control system, which is used to control the majority of the systems on board the truck.”
The vehicle is equipped with eight cameras: six LDK 8000 Elite series HD cameras (all Triax-based), plus one radio camera and one SuperMotion camera. It also has two EVS XT-3 servers, IP Director, XF2 storage with removable drives for data exchange with post production facilities, a Snell Kahuna 3ME vision mixer, a Miranda NVISION NV8280 matrix router, an LSB VSM control system, a Studer Vista 8 audio console, Genelec and Fostex audio monitoring, Dolby E encoders/decoders, Clear-Com Eclipse intercom and Harris G5 graphics.
Jiri Jires, head of Czech TV’s outside broadcast department, commented: “Our main aim was to build a truck that could easily be used for the daily production of material from smaller sports venues and theatres, and from places within cities where we can’t use larger trailers. We intend to gradually expand and upgrade our OB fleet and we believe that our next truck will follow the design of this latest vehicle. I was very impressed with the way in which Visual Unity incorporated all our special requirements into this project.”
Czech TV took delivery of its new OB truck in October and has already deployed the vehicle at major sporting commitments including the Euro Floorball Tour 2011.
