Blackmagic Forum

Seeking assistance on the final piece of our puzzle.

Our school district purchased and outfitted us with a new mobile production van. We're loading it up with a bunch of Black Magic gear.We've got the van completely wired and functional except for the final piece - field connections.

We film a lot of sports and have up to (4) cameras (SDI out) that we place in the field. Looking for the best method of getting signal from those cameras, back to the truck and into our Video Hub 20x20. Cable lengths can be anywhere from 50' to 3-400'

Old school me would loom (2) SDI cables, (2) XLR Mic cables for camera audio and com to the op, and a power cable together. I'm thinking there has to be a better solution. Fiber? IP? I just don't know the proper tools to pull this off.

To summarize, we need to:

* SDI out of up to (4) cameras in the field back to our van over a distance of 50' to 400'.

* Audio from of camera shotgun mics into our Allen & Heath audio console.

* Com to our camera ops.

* a PGM video feed from the van to our announcers in the broadcast booth (couple hundred feet).

Thanks in advance for any help!

-Rob

Fiber. What kind of cameras?

Panasonic AG-CX350 4K

Even with 3G, distances over 100m would be considered aspirational. Add the attenuation from a handful of panel jumps and the max distance is even less. To compound issues the camera audio output is unbalanced mic level which is also a bad idea over long distances.

I'm thinking it's best to run the SDI over fiber and demux the audio from the fiber/SDI feed post switcher, assuming the model supports it. Alternately use a transformer for audio and run it over XLR. Coms, power, camera control, I think would all need to remain copper.

Another idea might be to house the Videohub and some select components midway between the truck and the field. Put the router, Com base station, an ethernet switch, power distro, mixer, etc., in the right location and you might actually save some copper which is crazy expensive these days.

Good Luck

We do open air sports events with fibre runs of typically 200-300 metres. For comms we use Unity Intercoms running on iPhones with laptop master.

Our typical field set-up (if no camera hard power available) per camera is:

Camera end: 300 watt pure sine wave inverter pack with sufficient kWh battery to run camera, BM fibre interface and phone all day.
1 x Blackmagic Mini Converter Optical Fibre 12G.
1 x Armoured Singlemode Duplex LC-LC fibre (we have used runs up to 2 kilometres, zero issues).
2 x Gun mics direct into camera

Control end for 4 x cams:
ATEM Studio Converter 2. This tranceives 4 channels of Duplex fibre<>SDI and provides 2 x XLR audio out per channel. There is also a talkback version - ATEM Talkback Converter 4K, but we use the basic 4-channel Studio Converter.
12-way SDI Hub for ISO monitoring and ATEM inputs

This really is a quick simple set-up and for us, always works.