NASHVILLE—Camp Digital is a full service production company with a staff of five music and television industry professionals that collectively have more than 100 years of experience. Our specialty is program production for broadcast and multimedia distribution.
We own and operate our own state-of-the-art video production trucks, and early this year launched our latest vehicle—Thunderbolt HD. Since its commissioning, the truck has been working nearly nonstop with a wide variety of music-based shows. Much of our success with this new truck can be attributed to our selection of a Ross integrated system.
KEEPING IT SMALL AND LIGHT
Our new truck is built in a non-traditional trailer configuration, with gear size and weight being major concerns when we started shopping for equipment.
The interior of Camp Digital's new Thunderbolt HD Of course, we wanted as much bang for the buck as possible—a powerful switcher, high-end graphics, and bullet-proof signal routing that could stand up to the rigors of thousands of miles of highway travel and countless setups and teardowns.
The real estate required for Ross Video’s Vision switcher, XPression graphics system, and NK router was very minimal in comparison to other systems, so the choice was that much easier. The Ross Vision and NK switchers require very little rack space, which afforded us a lot of flexibility in locating the gear and in managing its cooling. (However, neither of the units generates a great deal of heat.) We also found that all three Ross units combined weighed less than some single pieces of gear we looked at.
We had our truck fully integrated in 27 days, thanks to careful pre-planning and a great team of technicians. We had super support from Ross during the integration process—their team was proactive in calling us to ensure we received all the support we needed. When we had questions about system set-up, Ross always had the answers.
We couldn’t be happier with our selection of Ross equipment for Thunderbolt HD, especially the XPression Graphics system. It’s very easy to operate and, what’s very important to us is that there are a lot of XPression operators in the freelance world. The system also includes some features that add a lot of value to live shots. One of these is an RS-422 input that allows us to take external information such as Twitter feeds directly into the system for display without having to recreate the information.
Building the Thunderbolt HD vehicle was our first “hands on” experience with Ross Video equipment in a mobile production environment, and so far everything has been letter perfect—it just runs smooth as silk. Even if an operator isn’t familiar with the operation of the Vision or XPression system, all it takes is just a few minutes of instruction to get them completely comfortable with operating either unit.
Tom Gregory is vice president of business development at Camp Digital, and has more than 20 years of entertainment broadcast experience. He may be contacted at tom@campdigital.net.
For additional information, contact Ross Video at 613-652-4886 or visit www.rossvideo.com.
