When NBC Olympics begins its coverage of the Beijing Games on Friday August 8, 2008, it will also signal a change in production techniques as the network, with one small exception, will rely on flypacks from Bexel Broadcast Services and Visions (UK) instead of full-blown production trucks.

"Because the games are in HD and the time of year we really felt it was not economically feasible to take a truck out of the North American market for three-and-a-half months," says Chip Adams, NBC Olympics VP of venue engineering. "So we decided to put all our facilities into a fly-pack operation, and when you do that it affects just about every aspect of the way we operate inside a venue."

For example, an OB van or mobile unit can pull up a couple of days before an event, plug in, and go. "With a fly-pack we're going to be in there about a week before just to get the facilities installed, the cables run, to get it to the level of a truck we had in past games," says Adams. "The real challenge for us is to coordinate the equipment coming in, the install schedules at the venues, working with the host broadcaster to provide the cabins for the venues, and working with the host broadcaster to get power for some of the smaller venues."

Bexel Broadcast Services, which has been involved with the Olympics going back to 1984 in Los Angeles, will support BOB, NBC Olympics, NBC News, and others.

"We're supporting them with a number of different items, a couple of small flypacks, a couple of Sony 3300 Super Mos, and a number of long lenses," says Craig Schiller, VP/GM of Live Event and Field Production. "We're also supporting the remote camera venders with a number of wide angle lenses."

The new offering from Bexel is the Hercules flypack and NBC Olympics will use it for the aquatic events.

"Over the years we've heard a lot of comments about flypacks and the ergonomics of flypacks with regards to the operating positions, being in front of shipping cases, not having proper consoles for operating positions," explains Schiller. "So we've taken that into account and have come up with something that we feel is quite unique. We have combined a number of racks into what we're calling dual racks. And we're doing a lot of internal wiring and including some operating positions in what we're calling modules."

Hercules has many key components including the Sony MVS-8000G HD Switcher with individual keyer resizers and internal format converters so it is future-proofed to support 1080-line progressive-scan high definition (HD) production in the future.

"It lives at the heart of the new flypack system," says Schiller, "And with the new interface with EVS this will give users' access to the flagship EVS XT [2], one of the fastest, most flexible and reliable HD video servers in the world."

Other components include the Pesa Cheetah multi-format 128x256 video router, Pesa DRS DA routing 256x256 AES, 256x256 analog audio, and Evertz MVP multi-viewers. For audio demands, Hercules has a Calrec Alpha Bluefin HD audio mixing console at its core, providing ease in 5.1 Surround Sound mixing and routing.

While running fiber optical cable is in fashion, Adams says NBC is using traditional coax cables to get the feeds to flypack facilities.

Read more about Hercules HERE