Known mainly for their work in horse racing, sports, music and entertainment, HDR works with all of the major Swedish broadcasters including the public broadcaster, SVT, and TV4 who is the country's largest commercial broadcaster.
HDR has recently built a new state-of-the-art OB vehicle featuring a number of DirectOut products that is presented as version 2.0 of their current HDR 6 24 Camera Expandable HD OB truck offering 24 seats with a true 5.1 audio mixing area. The new vehicle was built under the technical supervision of Sony's Martyn Smith and HDR technical director, Per de Navarro.
"Here at HDR, the workflow has always been the key thing for us, along with a "keep it simple" philosophy," described Per de Navarro. "When the time came for us to build a new vehicle, these factors combined with a tighter budget obliged us to do some serious research into how we could build a better and more powerful system at a reduced cost."
At this point, DirectOut was already working on an implementation of Lawo's Dallis protocol in order to remotely control their new, high quality microphone preamplifier, Andiamo.MC. "The idea of the new Andiamo.MC was to create a preamp that doesn't just deliver high end audio but also offers the flexibility of remote control from several different consoles and DAWs," explained DirectOut CTO, Stephan Flock. "When Per came to us with his request for getting Andiamo.MC to communicate with Lawo's Dallis I/O interface, we had only been in discussion with Lawo for a few weeks. However, as it is our stated aim to develop solutions for our clients, and HDR's schedule was very tight, we started to implement the protocol immediately. Fortunately Per was very patient with us."
However, it meant that HD Resources only had a few weeks over the summer period in which to redesign HDR 6, and thus the claim of seamless integration and high-end performance of all components required extremely sophisticated and meticulous project management.
"This was the biggest challenge of the entire project because we are picky and won't accept any compromise that results in a lower quality of function or performance," stated de Navarro. As it turned out, HDR were delighted by the number of solutions that were available to them using DirectOut equipment.
The performance of the new HDR 6 v2.0 has already been put to the test on a couple of productions.
(Jim Evans)
