Wide-Area Networking & Remote Production
A Calrec remote stage box
The use of wide-area audio networking makes possible the remote production of live TV events, where large geographical distances separate the production facilities and the events that are being televised. There is growing interest in this area from broadcasters, both in the potential for significant reductions in production costs as well as improvements in production quality. But there are difficulties to overcome if this is to become practical in a wide variety of circumstances.
This white paper by Patrick Warrington, technical director of Calrec Audio, explores some of the technical challenges, in particular, the transportation of audio, and the issues of reliability, redundancy and synchronisation, and briefly looks at a variety of relevant technologies and standards.
As SDI, AES3 and MADI are supplanted by AoIP, or Audio overIP — Dante, Ravenna, and most importantly, AES67 and possibly AVB the options available to broadcaster are increasing.
Today, for anything other than the simplest single-camera news remote, it is necessary for all the broadcast equipment to be taken to the venue. This means using one or more enormous mobile production facilities, and a great many staff to operate them. Warrington poses the question "what if all the raw video and audio could be transported back to a studio facility so that the production could take place there? There are currently lots of problems to overcome, but we can expect it to be a practical reality soon." The paper then looks at how this can be achieved.
You might also like...
Remote Contribution At NAB 2025
The technology required to get high quality content from the venue to the viewer for live sports production remains an area of intense research and development, so there will be plenty of innovation and expertise in this area on the…
Production Network Technologies At NAB 2025
As NAB approaches we pick up the key theme of hybrid production network infrastructure that combines SDI-IP network infrastructure & data center model compute resources, with a run-down of what to expect from vendors on the show floor.
KVM & Multiviewer Systems At NAB 2025
It’s NAB time again. Once again, as we head towards the show, we will take a look at the key product announcements across a range of key technology and workflow areas. We begin with the always critical world of K…
Sports Production Infrastructure – Where’s The Compute?
The evolution of IP based production and increased computer processing power have enabled new workflows, so how is compute resource being deployed to create new remote and hybrid approaches?
Building Software Defined Infrastructure: Shifting Data
The fundamental principles of how data flows through local and remote processing systems are central to designing software defined infrastructure.