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Satnews Daily
August 17th, 2015

Calrec Climbs Aboard Timeline Television's UHD1 4K/UHD OB Truck


[SatNews] Outside broadcast and post provider Timeline Television has installed a Calrec console in UHD1, Europe's first 4K/UHD OB truck.

Timeline built the truck primarily to provide content for BT Sport, which launched Europe's first live sports UHD channel on August 1st. Timeline, who also coordinate with BT Sport on its broadcast facility in London, chose the 40-fader Artemis console in part because it has a large fader count in a small footprint. Also, the surface is familiar to many experienced OB audio mixers, which minimizes setup times.

Hydra2 enables quick and easy integration with the truck infrastructure. More importantly, that ease of integration extends to Timeline's existing Hydra2 network at BT Sport in iCity, where there are three Artemis consoles networked to a central Hydra2 router core. Furthermore, the Artemis console easily processes 5.1 audio and offers exceptional redundancy. When taken in aggregate, this combination of qualities is critical to addressing the unique audio challenges of a 4K production.

Executive Comment

"Our aim is to deliver high-quality, exciting, and engaging 5.1 surround sound for all of BT's UHD and HD productions. But there are timing complications that go along with embedding audio and encoding/embedding Dolby E in 4K video that make it tricky," said Will Underwood, Timeline's lead sound engineer. "We easily overcome those challenges with the Artemis console. Redundancy, Hydra2 routing, the flexible range of fixed-format and modular I/O — all of those are important. And the loudness metering and 'look-ahead' limiters are particularly useful in helping mix engineers meet EBU R128 requirements."