59 SPONSORED CONTENT Lawo
at any moment. The latter will come in handy when RTBF decides to replace the SDI cameras currently in use with IP models. The blades in charge of converting their SDI signals to IP streams will not become obsolete in the process, either: operators can simply use them for other tasks. This was one important reason why Thoelen, who architected the OB trucks’ infrastructure, together with Sykora, was in favour of installing Lawo’s C100-based V__matrix units. RTBF’s overall decision to commission two identical full-IP OB trucks, however, provides the same advanced infrastructure for two crews covering different events to avoid any awkward discussions beforehand. REMOTE CONFIG FOR NEP’S SS4 As commonly happened during the Covid-19 pandemic, some projects involving physical builds in the US were delayed due to access restrictions and safety considerations. Nevertheless, Lawo’s US team managed to stay on course, deploying several big configuration projects according to plan. Among them was NEP USA’s new Supershooter 4 (SS4) OB truck in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Lawo’s director of project management,
Ari Klingman, supervised this all-remote configuration project – no Lawo employees went on-site – while Paul Ferguson and Colin Pfund acted as engineer leads, providing guidance to the NEP team. As such, Ferguson and Pfund, who have extensive experience with NEP trucks, agreed that working remotely during the pandemic was not radically new to them: “Certain things, like rebooting a device, take a little longer in an all-remote scenario, because you need to rely on someone to do it for you. Yet we also work remotely when we’re on-site, using Remote Desktop and Access from just outside the truck,” explains Ferguson. The lockdown situation therefore ‘only’ increased the physical distance among the engineers to the OB truck, requiring them to resort to video conferencing for coordination purposes. Thanks to select NEP team members, who were allowed on-site during lockdown, all required machines were booted in good time. The SS4 is equipped with over 110 V__matrix C100 blades, of which 69 are used as gateways (SDI-SDI, SDI-IP) and also provide embedded audio routing for third-party devices, while 45 form a vm_dmv multiviewer cluster; eight Power
THE V__MATRIX C100 BLADES ARE A BLANK PAGE, OR A BOX OF LEGOBRICKS THATALLOWSUSERS TOBUILDWHATEVER THEYHAVE INMIND
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