Beijing, China – January 16, 2019 - Blackmagic Design today announced that Shiyan based Shiyan Daily Media Group built a new 4K OB van using URSA Broadcast and URSA Mini Pro cameras, as well as a number of other Blackmagic Design products to provide a 12G-SDI 4K workflow. The new van continues the Shivan Media Group’s move from traditional print coverage to becoming a full digital media organization.

Designed by Wuhan Vijita Technology, the OB van uses a number of different Blackmagic Design cameras, including URSA Broadcast cameras, URSA Mini Pro and Blackmagic Studio Camera 4K. For switching, routing and conversions, they use Blackmagic Design ATEM Television Studio Pro 4K, Smart Videohub 20 x 20 and a variety of Mini Converters.

Shiyan Daily Media Group is one of the first print newspapers in China to have transferred to digital media. Its Shiyan Evening News won the “China’s Leading Digital Media Brand” award in 2012 and has more than one million followers on WeChat. The majority of whom are from Shiyan, a prefectural level city with a population of less than four million. According to new media big data analytics platform GS Data, Shiyan Evening News’s WeChat holds first place position among WeChat accounts of prefectural newspapers in China and has been one of the top 10 popular newspaper WeChat accounts in the country for many years.

“We have been doing well with new media because we started it off very early. Now that the time for commercial use of 5G has been confirmed and it will be much easier to get Ultra HD sources from the mobile Internet, we set our ‘mobile and video first’ strategy and founded a dedicated video team in 2017,” said Zhiguo Gan, deputy managing editor, multimedia division, Shiyan Daily Media Group.

At first, the video team created streaming content for Shiyan Daily’s new media platforms with smartphones and other simple devices, but these tools were not suitable for critical events that required multicam production, so they decided to procure equipment for professional live productions.

Speaking of their standard of choosing new solutions, Gan said: “The new solution must be reliable, have advantages over what our competitors are using, be future proof, able to get new functionalities with updates and be easy to use and maintain. Also, its supplier should provide professional support in a timely manner.”

The six camera 4K OB van designed by Wuhan Vijita Technology around Blackmagic Design’s 12G-SDI products won the contract. It includes two URSA Broadcast cameras and one URSA Mini Pro, each equipped with a Blackmagic Camera Fiber Converter, which is connected to a Studio Fiber Camera Converter housed in the van using a SMPTE fiber cable that supports bidirectional transmission of video, audio, talkback, Tally and camera control.

Blackmagic Studio Camera 4K is directly connected to the van with the fiber connection. All four camera feeds and two wireless feeds go into the Smart Videohub 20 x 20 router, which assigns and distributes the feeds to the ATEM Television Studio Pro 4K switcher and a backup switcher, monitors and a streaming device.

Looking back on the process of choosing products, the head of the video team Zhenyu Zhang said: “We saw how Blackmagic Design’s 4K OB van live streamed an intangible culture heritage event in Jingzhou. Also we visited Wuhan TV’s first HD broadcast studio, which was completely built with Blackmagic Design products, where most of Wuhan TV’s live shows are produced. This gave us confidence in the reliability of Blackmagic Design’s products.”

“In terms of advantages, when most new media and even broadcasters are still using HD products, every Blackmagic product in the van, including the camera, video router and switcher, supports 4K. But the costs are still lower than that of other HD solutions. Even compared with other 4K products, Blackmagic Design could save by one third, which can be used for future upgrades, such as adding 5G transmission devices.”

Zhang noted that the versatility of each Blackmagic product brings an overall advantage to the system. “It reduces the complexity of the system, making the van smaller, easy to use and maintain. For example, on the ATEM Television Studio Pro 4K, each input includes a re-synchronizer and format converter, so we don’t need extra devices because the switcher can take in any feed in any format, be it 720p from a drone, a non broadcast standard output from a computer, or any frame rate,” he said. “Also, both the URSA Broadcast and URSA Mini Pro can be used as a studio camera with a B4 mount or as a film camera with an EF or PL mount, which eliminates the need for more cameras.”

“This allows us to keep the crew small and that means lower operation costs. There are seven members in the crew, so there’d be profit if our van goes to some small or medium events; a common large OB van has to be taken care of by a much larger crew, which means much higher costs and there’d be no profit if it goes to these small or medium events.

The smaller van gives us more flexibility. Our van is a Mercedes Sprinter, enough to house all the equipment. So we can go to many places that large OB vans can’t go to, making us more competitive. Plus, all the products in the van are from Blackmagic Design, meaning the compatibility between each component is better than that of solutions consisting of various brands,” he said.

Before the van, most of the video team members had only used small video cameras and DSLRs and had rarely used broadcast equipment for multicam productions. Just a few days after the van was delivered, they started streaming with it.

“Blackmagic products offer intuitive UIs and are easy to master. We can find the functions very easily and quickly without scouring through menus. Less than a week after the first training, we did our first multicam live streaming for a high school military training with the van and went on live producing many other more complex events in the following two months, such as the China (Shiyan) Auto Products Expo, where there were separate venues and more screens for IMAG,“ he revealed.

It took less than three months to design, build up and deliver the OB van to Shiyan Daily Media Group. Gan pointed out that this not only proved Shiyan Daily’s efficiency but also their resolution to develop the video business. “This also means Blackmagic Design’s products and service are both reliable. Besides efficient van modification and delivery, Blackmagic Design’s authorized reseller Wuhan Vijita Technology always responds immediately when we need service and technical support and even sends experts to Shiyan to help and train our crew.”

Gan also shared his thoughts of the value of the OB van for new media development. “To adapt to media convergence trends, new media are actively exploring ways of increasing production value. Shiyan Daily Media Group started early and acted quickly and this has brought us a dramatic increase in advertising income, making us a model for many counterparts to learn from. In the past, we shared our experience in doing new media. Now that we have had our own 4K OB van, we will also share professional multicam production how-tos with our counterparts. We believe Blackmagic Design’s products will help more media like us, leading to a healthy and prosperous media industry,” he concluded.

Press Photography

Product photos of URSA Broadcast cameras, URSA Mini Pro, Blackmagic Studio Camera 4K, ATEM Television Studio Pro 4K, Smart Videohub 20 x 20 and other Blackmagic Design products are available at www.blackmagicdesign.com/media/images.

About Blackmagic Design

Blackmagic Design creates the world’s highest quality video editing products, digital film cameras, color correctors, video converters, video monitoring, routers, live production switchers, disk recorders, waveform monitors and real time film scanners for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries. Blackmagic Design’s DeckLink capture cards launched a revolution in quality and affordability in post production, while the company’s Emmy™ award winning DaVinci color correction products have dominated the television and film industry since 1984. Blackmagic Design continues ground breaking innovations including 6G-SDI and 12G-SDI products and stereoscopic 3D and Ultra HD workflows. Founded by world leading post production editors and engineers, Blackmagic Design has offices in the USA, UK, Japan, Singapore and Australia. For more information, please go to www.blackmagicdesign.com.

Ross Video Acuity A3 production switcher control surface

ALEXANDRIA, VA.—Video production switchers have always been large and complicated, but they are now more capable and complicated than ever. Manufacturers have done wonderful things to make the human-switcher interface usable in today’s products, as that one device can create titles, roll in video, control cameras, provide studio automation and, yes… switch between sources.

One company building production switchers is Ross Video, which has grown in recent years to include related technology such as studio automation. To learn about the state-of-the-art in production switchers and how they fit into the modern studio, BE Extra spoke to Les O’Reilly.

Les is Ross Video’s technical marketing product manager for switchers and the company’s openTruck product. He has been in the broadcast industry for 13 years, and stays active in the production side of the business as a technical director for many sports productions.

BE Extra: With HDR, 4K, IP video and other technologies making industry headlines, what do you concentrate on as a manufacturer? What technology do you build into a switcher today and what do you leave for the future?

O’Reilly: With all technology, you need to make sure that you’re moving forward but at the pace that the industry is able to move with. We can’t get too far ahead of what the industry wants. 4K or UHD is being used in very limited applications and does not seem to be high on the list of the majority of our customers. However we do have some interest and requirements, and that is why we developed Quad-Link 1080p3G over SDI. As the manufacturers of cameras and replay machines (for live sports) begin to develop a single-cable solution, we should also be moving into that 12G single cable solution and continuing to offer as many processing resources as possible.

IP Video is another item that is a little stretched at this time as well. There are no actual cost savings in the IP domain, but rather a cost increase with the required infrastructure to go around it. If we just look at using SMPTE 2022-6 standard, which is essentially SDI-over-IP uncompressed, then you’re trading in one cable type for another but having to implement new interfaces. To process video like a production switcher does, you can’t do this in the packet domain. You need to bring all the video together so that you can process it. You’re also not going to see a switcher that is all IP-in and all IP-out, as too many devices are still in the SDI domain. Hybrid systems will be what we see developed over time, with some inputs in the IP domain and other in the SDI domain. The other issue is standards, as not all IP is the same. Some vendors have proprietary standards that require licenses and proprietary chips; this moves the industry away from a standard interconnect protocol that we have had with SDI and will cause increased cost.

Les O’Reilly

BE Extra: Speaking of IP video, what’s something desirable that you can do with an IP switcher that you can’t do (or is much harder to do) with SDI? How about the other way around: Is there something easily done with SDI that’s hard to do with IP?

O’Reilly: From a production switcher application, there really is nothing that an IP input can offer that is superior to an SDI input. An IP video input needs to be processed, so an SDI input is actually less expensive. With SDI, we avoid decoding the input stream and avoid having to re-encode the video into packets for an IP output. SMPTE 2022-6 is just SDI-over-IP, which does not gain us much.

One advantage about SDI is that you can plug it into a DA and get copies of it out, then put those into a router and production switcher at the same time. I am always going to want my cameras to be in the router and the switcher. One comment that a customer made to me was, “When did you hear about a hacker getting into your SDI infrastructure?” Funny comment but it is something to think about. SDI is secure and a cost-effective medium currently that is not able to be displaced as easily as some thought.

BE Extra: Switchers used to simply switch. Now, they can do graphics, titles, motion video feeds and even have camera controls. Obviously someone has to operate the switcher, so what is done to make such a product usable by a single operator? Can the user interface be made simpler still?

O’Reilly: These additional features allow the use of macros or custom controls to integrate all this together in repeatable events. They allow the operator to create complex scenes that can be recalled at the press of a single button. The user interface is actually already being advanced for some of these things. Products like OverDrive lead the Automated Production Control environment and give an APC overview and control. This allows a single operator to control this from a single UI that is run-down based.

We also introduced the ViewControl user interface that puts the video and controls onto a touchscreen and makes things more visual and easier to process for many users. However there will always be a need for the hard control surfaces. More than ever we hear the phrase, “I want more buttons,” and that is just because users want more dedicated functions on buttons to make fast-paced operation easier.

BE Extra: Everything connects to the Internet today. What is Ross Video doing to prevent unauthorized access to its components? Is that enough?

O’Reilly: Network security is handled well by the IT professionals that that our customers have. With the push for inter-connectivity and control, it is hard to make these systems communicate and be 100-percent secure. We focus on the devices that need access to the outside world to have multiple network ports. This way it is easy for the control network to be left on an island that is not connected to the Internet, while the second side of the device can have access to the outside world on a different network. This makes it very easy to get the internet data needed, while keeping that potentially exposed network separate from your control and systems network.

Ross Video Carbonite Black switcher

BE Extra: For the most part, switcher control panels have lots of buttons that do certain things. The buttons can be reprogrammed, but there are still lots of physical buttons. Is there any interest in a switcher that uses a large touchscreen controller that can be completely reconfigured for different operators and different operations? Is anyone using anything like this?

O’Reilly: We do offer a product called ViewControl with our Carbonite series—it is a giant configurable touchscreen. It allows operators to control the production and watch the video at the same time. With an easy-to-use interface and the ability to load a new show, this works really well. However this is not as powerful as using a physical control surface and does not lend well to “on-the-fly” changes to the production or the effects, and that is where the panel will always be needed.

A touchscreen panel replacement is also hard since you do not have physical buttons to have your fingers on while you’re looking up at the video screen. This is where TDs have the most control, as they can feel their way around the panel and know what they are pressing and the result.

BE Extra: What else should we know about switchers and their future?

O’Reilly: Switchers are used to process live video in real time with less than a line of delay. This is a demand that is required for live events and real-time productions. As the data rates scale up, so do the switchers and the processing. Features and workflow improvements however are software implementations. We are constantly working on new features and improvements, and usually off these to existing customers, thus allowing us to improve the product in the field. In many cases, the feature set and functionality can be “upgraded” with next release just by downloading the software.

Advancements in production switchers are driven heavily by users who send in requests for new features and workflows. These are the ones who push the product to its limit, then tell us, “If it could do X, then that would make it easier for me to do Y, which would make the production that much better.” So the future really is what the users of the products are able to come up with and ask for. We are able to take those requests and make features for future releases, enabling the switcher to have this workflow.