Thomson Grass Valley Goes for Gold
Claims bragging rights to many aspects of HD production at Olympics.
By David F. Carr -- Broadcasting & Cable, 8/4/2008 8:21:00 PM
Thomson Grass Valley hopes news organizations will take note of how its HD equipment is going for the gold at the XXIX Olympic Games that start Aug. 8 in Beijing.
Jeff Rosica, senior vice president for broadcast and professional solutions, called it "a prime opportunity for us to showcase our solutions in a high-profile event -- and a pretty demanding event, by the way."
For the first time, the organizers of the Olympiad mandated that the Games be televised entirely in HD (even though some networks will wind up converting to standard-definition). Thomson claims particularly big bragging rights in the outfitting of HD sports trucks, those independently operated rolling TV-production facilities that service many big sporting events, providing feeds to multiple networks. Thomson estimated that 70% of the outside broadcast trucks at the Olympics are outfitted with Grass Valley HD cameras and that almost every Olympic event and venue will be covered at least partly by Thomson HD equipment.
Thomson captured a particularly big piece of the market for the event in terms of studio cameras and specialty equipment such as its Super SloMo cameras, reflecting its emphasis on HD sports production. The vendor doesn't have as dominant a position in camcorders, although some of its HD camcorders will also be used there. In fact, China Central Television will use 15 Infinity Series digital media camcorders, along with Thomson's EDIUS nonlinear editing software for its coverage.
The Thomson Grass Valley equipment being used for the Summer Games includes:
• More than 425 Thomson Grass Valley LDK 8000 mk II WorldCam cameras supplemented with LDK 6000 cameras;
• More than 100 Super SloMo cameras including 42 LDK 8300 3X HD Super SloMo cameras and more than 60 2X slo-mo camera systems;
• Several HD wireless camera systems;
• A total of 47 Kayak HD, Kalypso HD and XtenDD HD production switchers;
• A total of 18 Trinix and Concerto Series HD routers, alongside Apex audio routers;
• Encore and Jupiter routing control software; and
• Hundreds of Thomson Grass Valley GeckoFlex signal-processing modular products.
