REBUILDING “OB1” Zest4.tv are a multi-faceted production company offering bespoke and scalable solutions in the world of Outside Broadcast, Video Production, Audio & Talkback Solutions, and Live Streaming, as well as being go-to technical consultants and a very reputable (and well-stocked!) dry-hire company. By Erika Dobie, UK Business Development Manager at Canford I recently got in touch with Tom Herrington, Technical Director and Head of Outside Broadcast, at Zest4.tv to discuss a major revamp of the ‘OB1’ Outside Broadcast van. Tom: We’ve been performing a major upgrade on our ‘OB1’ van. We built it on a 7.2T IVECO Daily chassis. It has facilities for 8-10 cameras which makes OB1 perfect for sports, festivals, social media streams, or any other type of studio, venue, or outside event. Its smaller footprint allows us to slot it into smaller spaces, where larger expanding trucks can’t fit, but it’s still just as mighty, with three separate seated galleries for production (4 seats), engineering (2 seats), and sound (1 seat). This all started because we decided to upgrade the video matrix in OB1 from a Blackmagic 40x40, to a Ross Ultrix 72x72. We received the Ross equipment back in January 2023, but we had to wait until our current weekly OB contract had finished before we could start the build. We received the first Canford order in February. This was to pre-cable the Ultrix to the MUSA patch bay outside of the OB; we could chip away at this part in any spare time. Once that was completed, more Canare cable was then chopped into approximate lengths for other various bits of kit, and I terminated the micro-BNC ends and numbered each length. This meant that half of the job was already completed before I had to take OB1 off the road. By this point, 600 metres of BNC cable had been cut to length, numbered, and had a single end on. Good start!
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Source Material by Canford