Radio World Buyer’s Guide articles are intended to help readers understand why their colleagues chose particular products to solve various technical situations. This month’s articles focus on products that support sports and other remote audio coverage.
Many schools offer video production as part of their media curriculums, often producing live video webcasts of sporting events.
This requires a considerable commitment of video and audio gear. Ironically, the video, including the cameras, switcher and monitors, is often the “easy part.” It’s the audio that becomes a huge headache.
The broadcast team usually includes play-by-play talent, a “sideline” reporter, camera operators and a producer. Mixing their mics is easy. But you also need headphone audio, usually with a different mix for each user, and an intercom for off-air communication between the team members.
Henry Engineering says its SportsCaster does all this. “It’s ‘Audio-Control-in-a-Box’ that simplifies play-by-play sports audio,” the company states.
“It mixes the announcers’ mics, controls headphone mixes for announcers, producer and camera operators, and provides duplex intercom for essential communication between everyone.”
Tom White, a former high school video production instructor, told Henry: “Before we had the SportsCaster system, it would take me hours to install the audio gear. I was using several mixers just to deal with the headphone feeds and intercom. It was a complicated mess and never worked very well. Teaching students how to use it was nearly impossible.”
Hank Landsberg at Henry Engineering worked with them to design a system that would streamline the process.
“That’s where the SportsCaster came from,” White said.
“The SportsCaster allows me to mix audio and communicate with all of the members of our production staff with ease. For football games, we have talent who does play-by-play, a color analyst and a field reporter as well as a field producer, a social media producer and a producer. The struggle we had in the past was giving all of these people the ability to talk with each other in a way that didn’t require several mixers and complex wiring.”
He said the SportsCaster makes this task easy and that he can train producers on how to use the system in a few minutes before a game starts.
“Our producer can give cues to the announcers and/or field reporter, while simultaneously ‘calling the shots’ to the camera operators. The producer controls the intercom audio paths, so that each team member hears only what is necessary, without hearing comms intended for someone else. This minimizes confusion, especially when dealing with inexperienced student announcers and techs.”
SportsCaster works with Henry Engineering’s Sports Pod announcer stations and integrates all audio mixing, headphone and intercom functions into one easy-to-use unit.
Tom White now works at Amitrace, a new Henry Engineering dealer for the SportsCaster system and a systems integrator that specializes in video production systems for education, government, worship and corporate environments.
