CBC: remote production for sports productions with Calrec consoles

The Argo S and Brio sound tables Calrec play a central role in the production processes of the Cymru Broadcast Center (CBC) of Whisper Wales, a Cardiff infrastructure designed to deliver remote production capabilities to live sports.

Property of the producer Whisper, managed by Timeline Television and designed to be one of the most “accessible” remote production centers in Europe, the CBC was initially built to support coverage of 2024 Paralympic Games from Channel 4 and More 4. After covering more than 1400 hours of live sports In its first weeks, the infrastructure has been consolidated, offering a wide variety of live content daily, such as Women's World Super League for BBC One, BBC Two and BBC Red Button, as well as the Women's Rugby World Cup, in which England won their third world title on September 27.

To address the sound field, Stuart Frayne, director of technical operations, opted for Argo S y Brio of Calrec: “All of our sound supervisors have been very impressed with the functionality of the Argo, but in terms of integration, it is also very flexible; it works very well with other vendors and integrates seamlessly with our EVS Cerebrum as an orchestrator. Having a native IP core makes things easier when adopting IP workflows.” The consoles, while operating in a context AES67, may be adapted in the future to “all transport protocols” included in the ST 2110 contexts.

Michael Gerrard, Timeline's sound manager, adds that the option to access all the DSP functions on each bus is also a very powerful feature and especially useful for jobs that require a lot of ISO recording. "The ability to customize the buttons for routing to the buses also makes inserting channels into ISO very quick and easy in a fast-paced show. Furthermore, the ability of the surface touch screens to control and view the output of an external PC has been very useful for displaying digital scripts directly on the table surface, rather than relying on hard-to-see laptops placed to the side," he explains.

Calrec's presence at CBC is completed with nuclei Impulse1 redundant and remote application Calrec Assist, which provides full remote access to the console for making adjustments and changes on the fly.