Broadcasting from the International Broadcast Centre (IBC) in the Olympic Park, the BBC is using a number of Studer Vista and OnAir digital mixing consoles, along with a Route 6000 network core for its coverage of the London 2012 Olympic Games.

The set-up handles feeds from all 34 Olympic Games venues for domestic transmission. Following a promise to broadcast ‘every session of every sport every day’, this will amount to 2,500 hours of TV sports coverage by the close of the event. While Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) is providing host facilities within the IBC, the design of the BBC area is a collaborative effort between the broadcaster and Dega Broadcast Systems, led by project coordinator John Cleaver.

The installation uses of three 62-fader Vista 9 consoles, and a Vista 5 along with three OnAir desks (two OnAir 3000 and an OnAir 1500). Incoming feeds from the host broadcaster and the BBC’s own studios are fed to the desks, with the Route 6000 linking all the consoles.

A Vista 9 forms the hub of each of the broadcaster’s three HD and 5.1 production galleries. In addition, an interactive gallery (IPCR) will manage and route 24 separate streams whose destination will be the Internet, Red Button, and other platforms including Freesat, Sky and Virgin Media; these will be running in stereo using two OnAir 3000s.

Faced with taking the bundle of host broadcaster’s feeds and folding that into its own programming will involve combining the broadcaster’s own presenters with VT, and incoming HD-SDI video feeds and Outside Source (OS) lines. The OnAir 1500 will provide a microphone submix from the athletics stadium presentation.

Using the Vista 9 for the first time, Lead Sound Supervisor Pete Bridges notes that the metering allows fast reconfiguration when dealing with a wide variety of incoming 5.1 OS lines along with commentary and 24 microphone circuits from the studio via Studer’s D21m stage boxes. Other sources to the Vista 9 include VT and grams.

The Vista 9 in the main gallery provides 16 line inputs, 72 line outputs, 52 mic inputs (via ReLink sharing) with 112 AES inputs and outputs (the large number of ports being the result of having so many incoming 5.1 sources).

Situated in its own room, the Vista 5 is used as a backup gallery to the main sound control rooms (SCRs), and serves as a bypass source (should the main studio suddenly need to be put into bypass to allow a pre-record to take place). ‘We use the Vista 5 to pick up the mix, freeing the Vista 9s to mix the pre-record,’ Bridges says.

A further useful ability of the Vista 9 is upmixing stereo sources to 5.1 and downmixing 5.1 to stereo outputs.

The Route 6000 itself (which can accommodate up to 1728 x 1728 inputs and outputs) provides 40 line inputs; 40 line outputs; four microphone inputs and two HD-SDI de-embedder/embedder cards.

Use of the Studer ReLink I/O sharing resource enables technicians to share mic circuits between all the control desks. The key beneficiaries are the HD tie lines between the cores of each desk on Cat5, using Studer’s High Density data stream with 96 bi-directional tie lines to each of the four Vista consoles, sharing the desks’ sources and outputs.

Installation of the desks carried out by Dega Broadcast Systems extends a relationship between Studer and the UK’s state broadcaster that dates back more than a decade.

On the internal communications side, Riedel was responsible for supplying around 18,000 radio comms systems throughout the venues used by the event.

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