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.
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