REVIEW: Adventures In Anycasting

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It really wasn’t all that long ago that multicamera field production required a 50-foot truck, a dozen people, and lots of electricity, patience and aspirin. 

I’ve worked on field productions for over 25 years now, and it’s always amazed me that while the gear gets smaller, lighter and better, the truck gear seems to stay pretty much the same.  Of course, its not just the cameras, it is the supporting gear – the video switcher, the audio mixer, and the ancillary processing gear all take up considerable space.  We have all been the beneficiaries of technical miniaturization in the last three decades – this laptop I’m typing on is a fine example – and I think it’s high time that multicamera field production caught up with the trend.

Ok, it isn’t a 50-foot truck, but the Sony Anycast Station is a nice subset of one.  It combines a 7-channel video switcher, a 6-channel audio mixer, a graphics generator, monitors and other cool functions into a briefcase-sized package.  We at Wisconsin Public Television purchased an Anycast in January 2008, and in the intervening 10 months have produced almost a hundred events with it, including academic lectures, event coverage, music concerts, live theater, awards ceremonies and more.  It has proven to be an effective, if incomplete, tool for this type of production.  Let’s take a look at the particulars.

I recently bid on a very similar project, I looked at the Anycast but it didn’t fall within our budget. I went with the Datavideo Hand carried studio setup. It’s cost was $2000 and had most of what the job needed. Later we can add tally light and intercom but is strictly an SD setup. We could always upgrade to a HD/SDI switcher at a later date, but it would cost a bit more than the Sony and not be quite as portable. The really cool thing about the Sony is the portablity! The one thing the Anycast really needs is an H.264 encoder built in which can work for either QT, Flash, or WM.

Posted by RC Fisher  on  11/03  at  08:47 AM

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