Evertz has equipped TVN Live Production’s latest OB truck with its NEXX platform.
Designed ahead of the UEFA EURO 2024 championships, TVN’s TVN-OB8 is a fully UHD/HDR-capable truck equipped with two galleries and 32 UHD cameras. The company approached Evertz to provide a large-scale 704 x 704 12G-SDI UHD routing platform for the vehicle.
As the truck is aimed at large events, with a requirement to exchange a high number of SDI signals from 1080i to UHD 12G directly at the OB van patch panel with other broadcasters, TVN required an SDI-based router, however the NEXX processing and routing platform provided optional SMPTE ST 2110 gateway capabilities, effectively future-proofing the solution by enabling later transition to IP, said Evertz.
Evertz built a NEXX router with 704 x 704 12G-SDI I/O, 16 x 3G and 8 x UHD HDR conversion paths, and 48 standard and 14 advanced UHD multiviewer heads in 17 RU. The platform includes flexible modules for conversion, processing, and non-SDI interfaces. Supporting SD/HD/3G/6G/12G data rates, the router, which the company said is one of the biggest it has ever built, provides a clear pathway for ST 2110 transition, allowing more remote services to be adopted.
Christoph Moll, TVN Live Production’s technical manager for outside broadcast, commented, “With its distributed floating backplane technology for hybrid audio/video routing, frame syncing, multiviewers and conversion, Evertz’ NEXX routing platform was a very compelling option.
“The density of the router Evertz has built for us is phenomenal. It’s 960 x 960 UHD with Frame syncs, Embedders/De-Embedders, Multiviewers and Up/Down/Cross Conversion – and all in a non-blocking architecture, which makes it very reliable and easy to use.”
“This was a massive engineering challenge because nothing of this size had ever been done before,” added Sebastian Ruchti, sales engineer for Evertz in Germany. “What we built was certainly a first for the broadcast industry – the largest 12G UHD single link router anyone had ever made.”
TVN Live Production’s OB8 will be showcased at IBC2024 in the Outside Broadcast Area (0.A17).
