Broadcast of the opening match of the 2011 FIFA Women’s World Cup in Berlin fell to the FÜ1 HD truck, setting the scene for the surprise victory of Japan over the USA in the final, held in Frankfurt.
With the host nation German team playing Canada in the opening rncounter, German national broadcasters ARD and ZDF both used OB vans belonging to multiple public broadcasters. The audio and video feeds that were produced for the host broadcaster by contracted OB vans, were received and distributed for use for both radio and TV programmes.
Also used to cover the North Korea-Sweden match in Augsburg, and also the quarter final (when Sweden defeated Australia), the FÜ1 HD truck is equipped with eight cameras, and uses a Lawo mc²66 as the main console for audio production.
The programmability of the mc²66 allows OB crews to create console set-ups in the run-up to the broadcast that only require slight adjustment for broadcasting. The integration of various playback devices – including two EVS units, each with four channels for audio and video – as well as the communication system for all microphones, is more complex, however. Among these signals, wireless mics for presenters and flash interviewers feature prominently, as well as commentator feeds and additional playback devices.
The Lawo mc²66 installed in the FÜ1 HD truck is designed for two-man operation. It features 52 faders in a 32:8:16 frame, 336 DSP channels, and an HD-Core with integrated audio router. The router is equipped with three AES cards for BNC and D-sub connection and has a routing capacity of 8,000 x 8,000 crosspoints. Overall, the FÜ1 HD unit has 12 Lawo Dallis-I/O systems redundantly connected to the HD-Core. Three of these are used as stageboxes, allowing the connection of up to 80 microphones.
‘At mega sports events, many things can happen at the same time, and which must be edited simultaneously,’ explains Jürgen Becker, audio production engineer with BR, the Bavarian public broadcaster. ‘For example, an interview conducted while the main show is going out. Since these events are also broadcast in DD 5.1, we have quite a lot of input channels to deal with. This is one of the reasons we pre-configured the mc²66 in FÜ1 HD to be operated by two sound engineers,’
‘It offers extremely quick access to any signal by means of buttons on the control surface, but, more importantly, its overall controls are so very intuitive,’ adds Gerhard Fischer, one of the on-site sound engineers. ‘The Audio-follow-Video function also came in handy during broadcasts of the Women’s World Cup: A commentator could, for example, trigger the opening of an atmos microphone at the push of a button, so preventing an atmos change when the commentator mic was closed.’
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