Broadcast Solutions, a leading systems integrator and provider of innovative solutions for the broadcast media industry, has delivered two highly capable outside broadcast trucks to remote production specialists DMC. The trucks introduce a revolutionary concept, with the entire signal processing and delivery workflow powered by Grass Valley AMPP software.

“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,” Envall explained. “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.”

The resulting design is a compact truck which fulfils three requirements. There is operational space should there be a need to control any part of the production on site, and there is the data centre running the AMPP processing and GRID network. And, alongside all these capabilities, there is still room in the fixed axle truck to carry all the cameras, lenses, grips and other equipment to site.

This remarkable innovation means that what would require two articulated trailers for a conventional outside broadcast – an OB truck and a tender truck – can now be replaced with a single fixed axle truck, slashing the carbon footprint of the operation. At the same time, the whole reverse remote production system requires only 100 Mb/s of internet connectivity, a tiny fraction of that required by conventional remote production.

Each truck supports up to 16 cameras, with Grass Valley LDX98 cameras supplied by Broadcast Solutions as part of this contract. They connect via a traditional tailboard and stage boxes. Currently the trucks support 1080p native signals, in SDR and HDR, and are 4k Ultra HD ready.

Internally redundant Cisco routers manage the signals, with majority of processing carried out by the pair of Grass Valley AMPP servers with NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs and 11 TB of local storage per server providing full replay and super-slo-mo capability. Audio is mixed by a Calrec Argo M36 console.

External connectivity uses around 25 Mb/s for low latency control and data between the site and the production centre, and another 25 Mb/s for monitoring using WebRTC multiviewer streams. Programme outputs are delivered from the truck, typically by a 25 Mb/s SRT stream, leaving comfortable headroom in a typical 100 Mb/s public internet connection.

“This has been a great project, driven by close collaboration with DMC,” said Zlatan Gavran, COO at Broadcast Solutions. “They came to us with their outline concept for reverse remote production, and together we spent a long time working out how to realise the ideas using AMPP software.

“The result is something that has never been done before,” Gavran said. “A true software-defined outside broadcast unit, delivering the highest quality output while controlled from anywhere in the world. It uses cutting edge technology like the GRID (MXL) network and software tools but presents them in familiar form so that EICs, technicians, experienced operators and directors feel immediately at home.

“It hits all the best points of remote production – not least the huge environmental benefits of moving fewer vehicles and people around – and at the same time it is capable of conventional, local control if you need it,” he said. “These flexible trucks are not just for sport: they could be used for location productions where the director might want to be on site. The trucks are agile, capable, practical and environmental.”