Inside the OB Van

The Outside Broadcasting or OB Van for short is the heart of any cricket telecast. All signals both video and audio come to the OB Van, are processed there and then broadcasted. A typical OB van could be divided into three major parts. The first part takes up the major part of the van, and is where the director sits with technicians. They have a video mixer and a wall of monitors in front of them. The monitors accommodate all the video feeds from various sources, which could be from the graphics from graphic workstations, video feeds from cameras and videotapes, slow motion replays. The wall of monitors also contains two other monitors other than those from the video feeds–the preview monitor and Program monitor. The latter contains the dirty feed (mixture of video and graphics), which is broadcasted to the Earth station. The former shows the clean feed (only the video feed without the graphics) that is seen before broadcast. The video mixer may be accompanied by two or more computer operators for scoring the games and giving appropriate graphic feeds to be layered over the video feeds.

The next portion is where the sound is managed. The sound engineer has a sound mixer, which is being fed with all the audio feeds from various sources like: commentators, the stump microphone, field mics, etc. He has them in different channels and can control them individually. He is also supplied with a dirty feed monitor to help him with the synchronization of sound on instructions from the director.

The last portion of the Van is the Video store. The video store has a collection of Video Tapes (VTs) and could also have an EVS system. The VTs are a collection of pre-made CG videos to be used upon wicket fall, etc. These may also contain feeds from previous matches, which could be used for comparison. EVS is a live event system (slow motion disk

based editor) used for slow-motion pictures and replays in the match.

Inside the OB Van

(pdf format)

Geetaj Channana