Corplex uses Solid State Logic's MTP
Corplex was founded in June 1985 as an engineering and sales company. Two facility expansions and 17 years later, the company now provides equipment for system design and integration, maintains a rental department, and carries new and used equipment with more than 50 new product lines.
Corplex has also been in the mobile market since 1997, and has built three state-of-the-art digital trucks in 2001 and 2002. The main focus in the design of the fleet’s centerpiece truck, a 53-foot Expando called Sterling, was on quality, and providing customers with the ability to meet the demands of modern broadcast production, both now and in the future. The trucks can handle a range of sports or entertainment venues.
Corplex equipped the truck with a Grass Valley Group Kalypso switcher, Sony BVP-900 and BVP-950 cameras, a PESA router and a Dveous DVE from Accom. Corplex chose a Solid State Logic 192-input MT Production (MTP) mobile digital console for the audio component of the truck.
Corplex chose the MTP because its physical design and layout fit the concept and design of Sterling. In addition, the console offered capability for surround sound, as well as snapshot, 5.1 mixing and the new HS control processor. Two other features that sparked Corplex’s interest were the recall and reset functions.
Corplex consistently uses the same freelance engineers, so it is imperative that they have the ability to save and recall their mixes. They plan on broadcasting several college and professional football games, often for the same teams. The ability to recall the settings used for one game saves hours of preparation time and decreases the cost of operation.
The true test of any truck is how it performs in the field. One of the first events covered using Sterling was country artist Martina McBride’s first live pay-per-view concert on Oct. 13, 2001, at the Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis.
Production involved using a 48-track digital audio hard-disk recorder to record a multitrack master for future use, while also mixing the live stereo feed for uplink to five pay-per-view networks. Traditionally, events such as this would have required a dedicated production truck just for the audio. The MTP handled the 70-plus sources with ease.
In February, Corplex used Sterling for Supercross events in Indianapolis, Minneapolis and Atlanta. The total automation of the MTP allowed Sterling to shoot other shows between these events and recall the “Supercross” setup for each Supercross show.
In Indianapolis, separate shows were created for ABC and ESPN using nine cameras, including a super “slo-mo” unit. For the event, the SSL MTP supported 20 trackside mics, 16 tape/EVS playback channels, six music channels and eight announcer/interview mics. Having a compressor/noise gate on each channel helped to keep the mix clean.
On the video side, the Grass Valley Kalypso switcher with four M/Es accommodated the simultaneous production of two shows with different graphics packages.
Bill Coffel is an engineer at Corplex.