NAB Perspectives: Joseph Electronics’ Uys Takes Mobile Unit Into the Booth

For remote productions that don’t always have room for a mobile unit, Joseph Electronics’ JFS division showcased the Booth Caddie at last week’s NAB Show. The Booth Caddie, part of Joseph Electronics’ newly developed Caddie System, provides all the basic interfaces of a small mobile-production unit in a convenient portable case. The Caddie System is a complete remote fiber-transport production solution that provides customers with the pieces needed to improve existing equipment or use as a complete standalone system.

From left: Carl Roszczybiuk, director of engineering, JFS; Yohay Hahamy, SVP/owner, Joseph Electronics; and Gideon Uys, director, JFS

“[The Booth Caddie] is an integrated hub solution for everything from announce booths to stages to pregame shows, postgame shows, [and] halftime shows,” says Gideon Uys, director, JFS. “[It] encompasses all video, all audio, all data, all cameras over fiber.”

The Booth Caddie runs on four single-mode fibers and features audio preamps, IFB and intercom interfaces, camera support and transport, full data transport, and video options. Audio runs on a full MADI-supported infrastructure and can be adjusted locally or remotely via IP.

In addition to its in-the-booth applications, the Booth Caddie can be expanded or shrunk to meet a wide variety of production needs. HDMI-integrated outputs of 3G/HD-SDI signals provide a range of interconnect options, and each Booth Caddie also provides connections for up to four SMPTE-based cameras and have 2X integrated OPTC ports.

“You can add small stage boxes to it,” says Gideon. “The small stage boxes can then run to a press-conference room, to a sideline, to anything else and plug directly into the Booth Caddie, so you’re basically only running one cable out to the Booth Caddie, or dual if you want to have dual redundancy. We also have a couple of on-camera fiber solutions, but, unlike a lot of on-camera solutions out there, these are true production centers because they all have fiber loop-through, meaning that you can take any stage box and plug it into the nearest camera [and have] full audio-video backing [and] everything else at every position.”