- Posts: 432
- Joined: Fri Jan 22, 2021 7:22 am
- Real Name: Olaf Chen
- Equipment goes inside, away from the water, dust, dirt, mud, wind, sand and all the other stuff that ruins delicate equipment.*
- Cables plug in outside on a tailboard (doesn't need to be at the tail of the vehicle). Make sure you have the ability to replace connectors when they get damaged by exposure - avoid premade panels which require you to dismantle half the vehicle to change a single BNC.
- Consider cost-effective monitoring of audio / video / talkback from your tailboard - don't spend loads on it, it's only there to give you confidence you've plugged up correctly (or to talk to someone indoors while you adjust the patch) - expect to replace this stuff on a regular basis
- Make sure you can close the doors - your operators won't like sitting for hours in a furnace in the summer or a freezer in the winter, and certainly won't appreciate a damp draft coming in from a cable hatch by their foot. Uncomfortable operators = poor quality output.**
- Water gets everywhere - it doesn't matter how good you design your hatches, water will still get in. Design appropriately
- Never rely on the connector strain relief - someone will trip over your cable and yank it, or someone will try and pull it out without unplugging it first - use rope to strain relieve the cables before you plug them in to protect both the cable connectors and the tailboard connectors.
- Label everything CLEARLY - it's no fun trying to plug something in to SD1 written in 4pt Comic Sans on a cold winter night when there's a whole bunch of adjacent connectors just labelled SDI
* this is why the studio fibre converters, with their front panel fibre connections and no option to move them to the back were greeted with despair by many professionals - there's no way they are suitable for installing in a tailboard, and the front panel connector makes no sense in a rack location either.
** sure, your camera ops on the roof in the snow aren't able to turn the heating up, but they can dress appropriately and you can make adjustments to their environment - shelter + portable heating/cooling where possible. But proper camera's are designed to be operated in gloves, a thick winter coat and thermals - vision mixer panels and sound desks are not!