Broadcast Solutions Delivers OB Trucks To DMC

Broadcast Solutions has delivered two outside broadcast (OB) trucks to remote production specialist DMC that place software at the heart of live workflows.

In what the companies describe as an industry first, the trucks run the entire signal chain using Grass Valley's AMPP platform, enabling a 'reverse remote production' model that keeps processing on site while operators work from a central hub.

"We have been at the forefront of remote production, seizing the operational, environmental and commercial benefits of keeping our talented staff and technicians at our production bases rather than travel to site," said Jens Envall, Chief Innovation Officer at DMC Production. "But we also recognise the fundamental challenge with the conventional view of remote production: bringing all the signals back to a control room calls for a lot of bandwidth, for very high levels of stability on that bandwidth, and for very tight controls of latency.

"So we came up with a concept we call ‘reverse remote production’, where all the switching and processing happens on site, in an outside broadcast truck, but the control of that equipment happens in the central production suite. When we spoke to the team at Broadcast Solutions, they got the idea immediately, and together we moved rapidly from sketches to two trucks on the road, covering premium events like 3.Liga soccer in Germany and ATP tennis in Sweden."

Each compact, fixed-axle vehicle is arranged around three core needs: a workspace for local operation when required; an on-board data centre hosting AMPP processing and the GRID network; and storage capacity for cameras, lenses, grip and ancillary kit. By combining functions typically split across an OB and a tender trailer, the design consolidates operations into a single truck, significantly reducing vehicle movements and associated emissions.

The connectivity model is equally lean. The reverse remote workflow is designed to run over a typical 100 Mb/s public internet link. Approximately 25 Mb/s is used for low-latency control and data between venue and production centre, with a further 25 Mb/s for WebRTC multiviewer monitoring. Programme feeds are delivered directly from the truck, commonly via a 25 Mb/s SRT stream, leaving comfortable headroom within the connection.

In terms of production capacity, each truck supports up to 16 cameras, with Broadcast Solutions supplying Grass Valley LDX98 systems under the contract. Cameras connect through a traditional tailboard and stage boxes. The trucks currently operate natively in 1080p for both SDR and HDR and are provisioned for a future move to 4K Ultra HD.

Signal management is handled by internally redundant Cisco routing, while the bulk of processing is performed on a pair of Grass Valley AMPP servers equipped with NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs. Each server provides 11 TB of local storage to enable full replay and super-slow-motion operation. Audio is mixed on a Calrec Argo M36 console.

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