Clear-Com®’s intercom solutions are proving to be a game changer in enabling the French outside broadcast company, Boîte à Outils Broadcast (BOB), to continue production operations for Clique, the daily current affairs show produced by Première Fois Productions for Canal+, despite COVID-19 lockdown conditions.
BOB is responsible for the set-up and management of the technical control room for Clique, which is broadcast from Paris. With severe restrictions in place for travel and social contact, BOB’s technical team needed to ensure that this daily program could continue broadcasting while limiting travel as much as possible and keeping technical teams at home.
There are 14 people who work on the live shoot, including the director, producer, editor, sound engineer and camera operator, all of whom have been relocated to their homes. The equipment manager and sound assistant are the only team members who still report to the studio. Cyril Mazouer CEO of BOB, explained, “Producing at a distance should not mean a drop in quality. The technical choices we made when we built the control room made it easier to set up as a remote production as most of the equipment could already be operated virtually. Clear and reliable communication has always been a crucial element of live production, but it becomes even more important with virtually all staff working remotely.”
An existing Clear-Com Eclipse® HX-Delta digital matrix intercom system is installed at the studio facilitated seamless and flexible integration with intercom panels installed at each of the production team members’ homes. Some staff are using V-Series™ panels, while others have downloaded Clear-Com’s Agent-IC® mobile intercom app to their mobile devices, giving them a fully functional panel on their smartphone, tablet or wearable device that allows them to talk and listen to all the ports of the matrix, including IFBs.
The V-Series panels allow audio staff to remotely monitor the audio console (and any other audio coming from remote technical rooms) via two additional channels on the panel’s Aux audio connector. At the studio, the console’s control room outputs are connected into two matrix inputs, and the Eclipse HX-Delta frame then routes these to the Aux audio connector on the remote sound engineer’s intercom panel.
The panels are all connected via IP through ADSL interfaces or 4G connection. All panels can talk to the presenter’s on-set wireless ear-piece with very low latency (approximately 100ms to 150ms).
Cyril concludes, “Thanks to the confidence of Première Fois Productions, Clear-Com’s communication solutions and the ingenuity and creativity of our teams, the best conditions for safeguarding the health of the teams have been respected while maintaining optimal quality of production.”
“During the crisis, we have seen a large number of Broadcasters transition staff to remote working and effectively deploy our Agent-IC mobile clients with resounding success” said Nicki Fisher, Sales Director EMEA region. “Such solutions enable Broadcasters to accelerate their remote production plans.”
