Blackmagic Forum

We are a pretty large school district and shoot dozens of games with our 6 camera production truck. We are looking for a solution to make one of our cameras wireless with a range of about 500'. We bought the Transvideo Titan but it's terrible. Video drops when the camera moves. We are considering a Teradek Cube but we do not have an internet signal in the area of many of our fields (and I do not think they work with only wireless routers like wireless printers do or we could just throw some routers out there). Does anybody have a solution under $4,000 that would actually work??? Help!

The Teradeks would work in your case if you use some wireless routers to extend the range. If you just use the two cubes (they can use their own wireless network) the range is about 50-100m depending on the enviroment.

Have in mind that you get a little latency with these units. The camera signal is delayed by about 300ms.

Cheers

pro

I read on the Teradek site that it needed actual internet connection (not just a wireless router) for it to work. Maybe I was reading that wrong. If that is indeed true and I wouldn't need actual internet does anybody know if using a wireless repeater to extend the range would work?

As I wrote before:

The Teradeks create their own wireless network. But - you want to pair the units with some wireless routers to extend the reange. If this is your question: Yes! They work with wireless routers perfectly.

We have some Teradek cubes and are working constanty with just the two cubes or some wireless routers in between.

Cheers

pro.

I'll second that no Internet connection is required. The latency is what will get you in a live production. 300ms is nothing to sneeze at!

Also check out the Teradek Bolt. It is Wireless SDI although I'm not sure it will have the range you need. Very, very low latency though.

Thanks,

Benjamin

A wireless transmitter/receiver allows point to point wireless links ,also referred to as ptp wireless, to cover greater distances and get around obstructions that may limit line of sight (“LOS”). Wireless repeaters are also used to provide a greater signal level where needed.

as someone who has some pretty extensive experience in this area i suggest you just wait ... get a real solution one that will cost you more give you way more functionality and you won't have the latency ... in a live situation that is soooo important.

some solutions out there can be had by anton bauer, idx, bsi sports inc, vislink, rf central, cobham wireless just to name some ... most all can be had in license free 5 ghz range and are very low latency

i don't want to take a shot at taradek's product's i have some they are great for certain solutions but an outdoor environment shooting live video is not their forte'

wireless is cool but like anything else you get what you pay for people have been shooting wired sports for years take your $4k and get some fiber and camera converters or ccu's

Just wanted to add my two cents - we use two wireless cameras with Teradek Cubes as part of our 5 camera setup. For football games we have an Aerohive AP170 (Access Point) attached to our press box which feeds a 12 port Netgear gig switch. The Teradek decoders connects to the switch via ethernet, and the Teradek encoders connect wirelessly to the AP. This allows us to cover every spot on the field wirelessly and I could not be happier with the setup. To put things in perspective, we are a high school and we provide an internet live stream and video for our jumbotron. The latency issue might be an issue for professional broadcasting but it is not an issue for us. Especially, for the viewers of the internet stream. We hardly ever cut to the wireless camera in live play, where latency could be an issue. The wireless cameras feed our replay system are also used to do closeups of players, on field interviews, student section, etc. We use this setup for indoors as well, basketball, swimming, volleyball, music performances.

My Teradek Cubes are set to 720p 59.94 @ 4Mb/s. A professional router or AP is most definitely needed to make this setup work. I had limited success with a D-Link $100 router but it was still better than an Ad-Hoc connection.

Here's a link to a short video to show how I cut between a wireless and wired shot. This is screen captured so do not judge the image quality.

I use a Paralinx Arrow for our wireless camera. It's about 300 feet line of sight. Full HD, less than 2ms of latency, which I've never noticed. No wifi network needed. Basically plug in play via HDMI. Transmitter mounts in your cameras shoe mount. 1 receiver, 1 transmitter is $870. If you want something a little more heavy duty they just introduced their Paralinx Tomahawk, which is 2000 feet line of sight although it's a bit over your budget..$4300.
http://www.paralinx.net/products/

I use a Teradek Cube 155 on top of my camera. I have a 5ghz WiFi dish linked to that which is then cabled to a Cube 305. It works almost flawlessly over approximately 150metres line of site. I have virtually zero latency due to a configuration setting in the encoder, as long as you don't want it to be decoded by anything other than a Cube product (they will also do streaming to iPads etc).

Sure, it's not a Boxx or IDX etc., but its also a very different price bracket.

SP