Blackmagic Design has revealed details of a collaboration with Sobatech Group to support its live coverage of the F4 Spanish Championship and Eurocup-3.
Aiming to reduce costs and logistical footprint as it produces coverage on behalf of promoter and rights holder, EPIC Championships, Sobatech has centralised operations at its Banoyles hub, minimising crew and equipment requirements at each circuit.
With events lasting up to 10 consecutive hours, reliable transmission between the tracks and Banoyles is essential. Xavier Soler, founder and CEO at Sobatech, said, “We needed reliable transmission between the track and control room, alongside a flexible setup capable of handling and synchronising around 34 inputs without external converters. The production also had to support a multi output workflow, tailoring each feed to the specific editorial needs of each broadcaster.”
Positioned at every circuit, 14 URSA Broadcast G2 cameras cover up to seven kilometres of track. The cameras are connected to a 4G router, with a VPN connection to Banoyles aiming to enable remote camera control, tally and lens control. “The return feed allows operators to monitor the programme output, although with about 1.5 seconds of latency, they are required to anticipate the action and make decisions independently,” said Soler.
Encoded in H.265, camera feeds are transmitted via contribution systems based on the Haivision SST protocol, aggregating 4G and 5G connections from multiple carriers, along with Starlink, aiming to ensure a robust link with the remote production hub.
An ATEM 4 M/E Constellation 4K with an ATEM 2 M/E Advanced Panel 40 provides hardware control and management of cameras, graphics, replays, playout and backgrounds, said the company. Signal distribution and recording is provided by three Blackmagic Videohub 40×40 12G routers.
Onsite servers remotely controlled from Madrid generate graphics, with two fill and key pairs fed into the vision mixer. A full graphics feed is distributed to DAZN Portugal, REDTV in the United States and Canada, YouTube, Twitch and more. Sobatech creates dedicated unilateral feeds for DAZN Spain and DAZN UK, adding local commentary, commentator footage and pit lane interviews to the main interview.
The HyperDeck Extreme 8K HDR broadcast deck’s four channel recording capability enables simultaneous capture of the wall feed, clean feed and English and Spanish versions. A second unit records an H.265 version of the clean feed for external editing. Recordings are written directly to a Blackmagic Cloud Store Max 24TB network storage solution, enabling access to the files while recording is in progress.
