As another Women’s Super League season draws to a dramatic close, Vivid Broadcast, which provides a hybrid broadcast solution for Sky’s coverage of the league, is celebrating an important milestone of its own – the roll out of the all-new Barra OB.

Said to enable Remote Production 2.0, Barra is a flexible, sustainable and design-led unit that prioritises comfort and efficiency while also offering technical innovation.

Barra made its WSL debut at Villa Park on 15 March marking the end of a year-long project involving specialists including Belgium-based engineering and design firm Projectbuilders and coachbuilder Spectra, as well as a significant amount of in-house work.

“The technical integration was done completely in house,” explains Francis Cousins, lead vision guarantee at Vivid. “We did all of the schematics, the diagrams, the equipment procurement, and then the wiring was done by a company called Mottram.”

“When we started designing the truck, we had a number of factors that were important to us,” adds Rory Springthorpe, managing director, Vivid Broadcast. “We knew we wanted a low footprint unit both in terms of physical size and environment and yet inside needed to feel spacious and provide a really flexible environment.

“From the early stage we knew we wanted to work with the team at Projectbuilders, as for us this wasn’t just about creating a functional truck but a beautiful working environment. From early discussions we knew that Eddie and Griet at Projectbuilders not only understood the technical requirements, having designed literally hundreds of trucks around the world, but also brought that creative energy.”

The attention to detail that has gone into the design is immediately clear, with spacious, well-defined workspaces for the sound, video and production teams that offer the peace needed to get on with the task at hand. Windows between the three areas ensure clear lines of sight between teams, while soundproofing, silent air conditioning systems and adaptable lighting all help to achieve optimum comfort levels, and a full length gangway complete with awning along the side means it’s easy to move between the different areas of the truck and maintain that interconnectedness.

“The inspiration for the design was very Vivid-esque,” adds Danielle Scivill, head of OBs, Vivid. “We’ve embraced Vivid’s brand, style and heritage, and the look runs through our offices and Remote Production Centre too.”

Indeed, the idea that the OB should be a comfortable, welcoming place to work, bringing a hospitable feel to the truck, was central to the design thinking.

“It’s hard enough coming to an OB, you might have a long day ahead – the truck environment can be pivotal to the success of the production, and how you feel about your day’s work. Having a calm workspace to operate out of is a real game-changer,” she continues.

“And the thing is, everyone’s happy on site and everyone does a better job as well,” says Cousins. “The small things make a real difference.”

“We know the welfare of crew is really important,” agrees Springthorpe. “Too many times vision engineers sit in noisy environments with air con blowing down the back of their neck, while the kit tries to stay cold, and you try to stay warm. The team at Projectbuilders have designed a great air con system that means you don’t ever feel it switching on and off, but it just keeps the room at the right temperature.”

The team on site is also benefitting from the fact that the new truck is significantly reducing setup time on arrival, while new tech within is helping to ensure smooth and streamlined production.

“The truck is basically plug and play, we can roll it out and hook it up really quickly,” says Scivill. 

“Now we roll up, drop the jacks, switch the power on, do the power testing and establish the connectivity,” expands Cousins. “We work through the usual checklist, but everything has just been streamlined a little bit which has bought set up down from around two hours to one. It’s a far calmer and more streamlined operation as a whole.”

Integrated battery technology is one reason for this. “The battery backups are all integrated, which has engineering benefits as well as green benefits,” Cousins adds. “All of our documentation says the truck can run for six hours on battery, but we’ve been on a rig and run it for 10 hours and still had 30% left.”

Set up is also simplified: “We turn it on, the green light comes on and it’s running,” he adds. “We used to worry about the batteries sometimes, but now it really is you push a button and it goes.”

The team on site for today’s match, which saw Arsenal beat Leicester 7-0, includes three vision engineers, a sound guarantee, three sound engineers, a trainee technical assistant, camera guarantee and assistant as well as eight camera operators supplied by Sky.

Barra’s audio suite is dominated by a Calrec Argo M 48 console – one of the first of the new generation of 48 fader units in the country. A new wireless comms system is also being tested, a sign of the ongoing R&D that Vivid places such importance on. The company is also passionate about developing new talent and a foldaway desk means trainees have a dedicated position that allows them to fully participate in a production or enables both a sound guarantee and supervisor to operate comfortably.

“We went through quite an in-depth process before moving forward with Calrec,” adds Springthorpe. “While we have Calrec Summa and Artemis desks in other trucks which meant that in many ways it was a logical way to go, given the level of investment we were making we really wanted to be sure it was the way to go at this time.

“We knew that some of our major clients including Sky were using Calrec desks and with the development of True Control 2.0 this provides such a powerful way of operating for remote production – enabling engineers in the RPC to have full control of the desk and operate as if on site.

“Similarly we rolled out RTS comms as the integration between galleries.”    

Both sound and vision galleries are based around the Buttons control system from Bitfocus, while the truck’s core routing infrastructure is built around a Ross Ultrix FR5 SDI router, with Calrec working closely with Bitfocus to ensure deep level integration.

“It’s a fairly new control system so we’re early adopters,” says Cousins. “The moment we saw them launch it, we got in contact to say we were very interested and wanted to help them mould this to fit into a professional broadcast environment, and we’ve been working very closely with them since.

“Essentially it uses some of the connections that they’ve built with the open source world, which have been ported over to this professional control system, and then a lot of professional levels have been added as well. So we’ve got all the router control, but we’ve also got some really innovative elements. We can see fibre levels and that’s something that most people don’t monitor because to actually get that data you have to go really low down. But now we’re aware of those levels and we can be completely across everything.”

Vivid used AI coding to help build the integration, something that Cousins sees huge value in.

“Traditional control systems are very locked down and adding new features takes time. We’ve been able to roll this out in a day, just using the tools we’ve got here. The sky’s the limit – there are so many different bits of kit we want to start controlling, we can start linking things together a lot more – it’s really quite something.”