This year’s Tour de France cycling race, produced by Euromedia, began on 4 July in the Netherlands, and has been making use of a new Lawo-equipped OB truck.
The 102nd edition of the world’s biggest cycling contest is taking 22 teams of nine riders over 3,360km of road, through 21 stages in the Netherlands, Belgium and France. After starting in the city of Utrecht, the tour will close on 26 July, on the Champs-Élysées in Paris.
The new Euromedia OB hybrid production vehicle C42 supports ten to 12 cameras and is co-ordinating all the RF audio feeds before forwarding them to the truck responsible for the international broadcast feed. It is also able to provide an emergency backup in case of any failure.
The OB is accompanying the riders at every stage of the race, with its Lawo V__pro8 video processor unit, being used for colour correction of the video signals received from the motorcycle camera teams. The sound mix is being performed on a 48-fader Lawo mc²56 audio mixing console with a space-saving 7U compact core providing 144 DSP channels and a capacity of 5120×5120 crosspoints in redundant operation. Three DALLIS frames – two for use as stageboxes outside the vehicle – are providing the necessary I/O. Overall control of the devices will be assigned to an L-S-B Virtual Studio Manager (VSM) System, managing communication and switching of units from different manufacturers serving a range of functions.
The V__pro8 is a compact video processor that allows eight video channels to be used freely with 384 audio channels. It offers cross-format conversion, colour correction and embedding and de-embedding, using protocols including 3G-SDI, MADI and RAVENNA. The V__pro8 combines a number of different tasks in one tool.
