F&F Taps GV, Ikegami for US Open Coverage

Mobile production company F&F Productions debuted its new GTX-16 mobile production truck in New York to help televise the 2010 U.S. Open tennis tournament in Flushing, N.Y., on CBS Sports. The tournament began Monday and runs through Sept. 12.

The HD-capable production truck features a Grass Valley Kayenne Video Production Center and a Grass Valley four-channel K2 Summit-based ClipStore System, for producing both sports and live entertainment programs in HD. The replay system is based around a four-channel K2 Summit production client, providing a platform for instant, non-volatile replay of more than 10 hours of video, key, and audio clips.

“We continue to choose Grass Valley switchers because of their reliability factor, which is most important to our clients,” said Ryan Hatch, senior vice president at F&F Productions. “We also like the Kayenne’s features and color-coded control panel, which is easy to operate for the crews and gives us a lot of flexibility to produce all types of live productions.”

The GTX-16 also features 12 Ikegami HDK-79EC camera systems employing three 2/3-inch 2.5 Mega-pixel-specified CMOS imaging sensors.

“As our business continues to grow, we rely on the latest HDTV cameras from Ikegami for the flexibility to be able to produce content in 720p, 1080i, or whatever format our clients request,” comments George Orgera, president and CEO of F&F Productions. “With the Ikegami HDK-79EC and its CMOS technology, we have that flexibility and are native in all of these formats. The Ikegami HDK-79EC is the best available. Its CMOS imaging technology not only delivers sharp, multiformat HD, it’s also lighter-weight and consumes less power.”

Configurable for either portable use or as a “hard” field/studio camera, Ikegami’s HDK-79EC’s 1980H by 1080V active-pixel CMOS sensors are switchable between interlace and progressive readout modes. Providing a full 16:9 aspect ratio, the HDK-79EC’s CMOS sensors provide 1080/60i, 1080/24p, and 720/60p HD as well as optional 50Hz formats, 1080/50i and 720/50p, high-speed dual-link 1080/60p, and Super Slow Motion, 720/120p and 1080/120i.

“In this day and age, a lot of stadiums—especially at colleges—are still triax,” Orgera notes. “We have Ikegami’s triax adapters and fiber adapters for the cameras, so we can go either way.”