Out of the frying pan and into the Fibre

[warrbeat]

So the latest project is the video system upgrade including rebuilding the entire booth, rerunning cable to cameras, HD/SDI, RGB, HDMI, Cat6e, and fibre to mention a few things I'm going to be working with.
I came to the realization that no matter what I do, there is no good way to synch live video with the sound system...
One of our latest purchases is an HD wireless video system for our PMW 350 ENG style camera. The purpose of the wireless is to get the camera to the crowd for kiss cams, interviews, sponsorship plugs and those ever so challenging trivia give aways...
What I recently discovered was that no matter what I do, there is no way to get the video into people's eyes and the audio to their ears at the same time. After all of the time we spent tightening up the sound in here, our latest purchases will drag it back down.. kind of depressing really.
Right now, all of the audio is either coming from wireless mics, the DJ component or the video booth audio feeds which had very little to no live video . We've never really gotten into closeups of the crowd while running audio and unfortunately the old sound of light vs sound is rearing it's ugly head again.
We're going to be sending the video signal to the score clock 10 mm LED screens via fibre optic much like it is now except we are actually putting live action, full production shots instead of 16 bit animated graphics. My thought was to run the audio from the video booth to the closest DSP and since it's connected to it's master panel via fibre, it will synch fairly close... then it dawned on me that I'm still sending the signal through some copper (150' or more to get there). Well that won't do now will it...
So I figure I'll bite the bullet and connect the audio mixer in the video booth to the DSP through a fibre line thus increasing the speed of the signal.
Then it hit me... no matter how fast it's going to get to the sound board, we are delaying all of the various elements of the sound system to itself and unless we delay the video signal as well we're going to have the "lip synch" look on the screens. That would work well except I don't have a variable output delay on the video signal... more like a global delay option....
More to come as the sytem shapes up...

Coming to you live from the Station, this is a very perplexed Warren signing off for now....

[macrae11]

The PMW-350 is a great cam! Don't leave it unattended when I'm around, or you might not see it for a while. I haven't actually used that one, but I've used several of its smaller brothers, and they're all pretty awesome.

When dealing with these speed of light vs speed of sound issues, I usually find the most satisfying results come from figuring out what the variance in delay is from the closest seat in the house and the farthest seat in the house and setting the delay about 1/3 of the way between the two towards the close seats. So for the people near the front the sound will be slightly ahead of the video and towards the back it will be slightly behind the video, obviously with the cheap seats getting the worst of it. The reason for the 1/3rd placement is that our brains are used to hearing audio slightly later as opposed to slightly earlier, so having it more towards that end of the spectrum will be a bit less unsettling.

There's no way around the laws of physics unfortunately.

[Malcolm Boyce]

There's no way around the laws of physics unfortunately.

[RoadDog]

[warrbeat]

If you think the 350 is nice, I won't tell you what were getting for the main camera in the press box... Oh OK... We're getting a PDW 700 with a Canon 17:1 lense and a 2X extender... but now you're banned from the building... LOL
I bet you'd probably be entertained by the switcher since we're getting as well...
http://www.broadcastpix.com/Products/Slate-3000.html

We're actually getting the 3032 model. It's not a Ross, Grass Valley or Sony but it's has a lot of great features (and almost all of the options) without having to buy tons of HD outboard. It's also easily upgraded to the 5000 which is 2 M/E version.

I'm starting to design the Control room remodel this week and hope to have construction start in a few weeks. (gotta wait until all the home games are done).


As far as the delay times, the variance between last row upper bowl at the goal ends and the sides is substantial... it's a Bitches Brew I gotta tell ya.... We had to delay more zones than originally spec'ed in the original design... the true issue in delaying the video is that we want as close to real time for the live game which we will be shooting continuously onto the screens and the close up crowd stuff we'll be dropping in over top.... The only way to really do it properly is to record all of the give aways etc and then play them back...
Everyone sing along... "if I had a Million dollars, I'd have a crew of 12 with a full editting suite during a game..."
LOL
Exciting!

[macrae11]

Very Cool! I'm not actually as up on switcher technology, since I don't work in broadcast, just in production. Looks fun though.

How many crew do you have? If you're dropping 50 large just on cameras, you'd think you could pony up for a little newscutter system. Then it's just a question of manpower. Wireless live capture direct into the Avid, minor graphics added, real time output through a Mojo, should only be a minute or two round trip. I know there's still a few editors around from Globals layoffs that would love a gig on the side.

Another option, is it possible to have a variable delay for the video screens? Realtime when shooting live action, but a 90ms(or whatever) delay that kicks in when doing interviews and stuff?