When EMG merged with Gravity Media in early 2024, opportunities arose for the newly formed company to accelerate its remote production workflows. What followed was Gravity Media’s next major technology expansion phase at its West London Production Centre, which included a new audio facility with Calrec solutions at its heart.
Gravity Media’s 38,000 square foot remote operations centre (ROC) facility has a selection of ten dedicated sound control rooms featuring Calrec Artemis surfaces, ranging from 32 faders upwards, connected by Calrec’s H2-IP Gateway (an interface between a Hydra2 network and an AoIP network), two 48-fader Calrec Argo S consoles with ImPulse engines, and a 36-fader Argo M with internal DSP.
The facility also has 21 flexible multi booths, primarily available for off tube commentary or voiceover, each equipped with video and audio monitoring and production talkback. The installation was completed in the spring 2025.
The development of the Production Centre, in London (White City) and the flexibility of the audio infrastructure, has enabled Gravity Media to continue to refine its workflows, simultaneously increasing its throughput while reducing both its financial outlay and environmental impact.
“Over a 24-hour period, we had 160 people at the facility broadcasting live tennis from Rome, rugby from London and Formula E from Tokyo,” says Paul Sykes, chief facility engineer for Gravity Media. “That’s 160 people who are not taking flights to Tokyo or Rome and having to book hotels. It means we can utilise all our equipment and use it multiple times a day”.”
Although Gravity Media has been producing remote content for many years – the company was remotely producing Rugby League with Canada’s Dome Productions as far back as April 2019 – working with Calrec as an audio partner has enabled it to deal with a variety of common challenges, as well as provide a flexible template to build on for future development.
Gravity Media’s Production Centre in London White City was designed as an SMPTE 2110 IP facility from the outset, but the company knew it would need to find a way to accommodate legacy audio feeds like analogue, AES and MADI that were not IP-native signals like Dante or AE67.
Incorporating a combination of Calrec ImPulse IP cores, Hydra2 and IP Gateways provided it with a way to fully integrate every flavour of audio stream seamlessly while also preparing for an eventual migration to a fully IP environment as Westworks’ phased expansion progresses.
Working with Calrec as its audio partner enables Gravity Media to bridge all its signal ingress in a seamless manner, as well as delivering the potential to adapt to future requirements as its needs change.
Network connectivity and full redundancy are paramount, and Calrec’s infrastructure delivers with seamless switching to robust signal paths in the event of an issue to deliver a robust disaster recovery plan.
Gravity Media’s SMPTE 2110 network already provides seamless protection switching over ST2022-7, Calrec’s IP audio infrastructure incorporates additional redundancy across its audio paths. While presentation is fully remote, everything is separated across red and blue networks, and Gravity Media has set up each presentation video feed with 2 x 8 channels of discreet audio.
In addition to keeping everything phase coherent, it means that if one goes down, Gravity Media still has access to every audio channel. In addition to providing diverse signal paths for incoming signal paths, the company also uses different ingest pipes at different ends of the building.
From an audio point of view, latency is always the biggest headache, especially when that audio is controlled remotely. Audio sync and latencies from signals travelling long distance from a remote venue to a central ROC always need to be mitigated, and Calrec’s simple edge processing solutions provide an easy fix for in-ear monitoring.
Using RP1 Remote Production units located at the venue and remotely controlling them from Westworks, elegantly means that timing for IFBs and presentation mixes are always in real time.
RP1 uses Calrec’s True Control technology to allow faders on the audio desk at Gravity Media to pair with the RP1at the venue to do a real-time mix onsite to create all of the in-ear presentations from an aux feed out of the RP1 itself.
While around 90% of productions that come through its West London Production Centre are currently using Calrec’s RP1 to mitigate latency for onsite talent, Gravity Media’s recent investment in Calrec’s Argo technologies means it is already looking at how it can deliver even more control in the future with the latest iteration of Calrec’s True Control 2.0 technology. True Control 2.0 is enabling Gravity Media to not only develop the scale of its remote production within its Production Centre, but across a new generation of outside broadcast units primed to deliver more efficiencies and even more robust redundancy.
True Control 2.0 expands remote and distributed production ecosystems by giving broadcasters the ability to control any Calrec system from anywhere in the world. It provides access to more cores and more surfaces, wherever they are, and each controller console can access up to five other consoles simultaneously. It gives broadcasters much greater levels of remote control without the limitations of mirroring or parallel controlling and incorporates Calrec’s ImPulseV DSP cloud resources, Argo M, Argo Q, Argo S and Type R, as well as Calrec’s Apollo+ and Artemis+ consoles. It allows any of these products to remotely control any other True Control 2.0 enabled product.
For Gravity Media, True Control 2.0 expands the level of control it has across devices to incorporate more processing parameters like dynamics, EQ and delay.
The combination of three new Argo mixers in its latest Production Centre expansion, and the adoption of more Argo consoles in truck builds elsewhere in Gravity Media, gives the company the ability to provide total remote control over a surface at a venue directly from the centre.
This is not only a much more environmentally sustainable way to work but builds in yet more redundancy with a full disaster recovery desk located at the venue in the event of connectivity issues and illustrates how forward-thinking facilities like Gravity Media are using technologies from companies like Calrec to continually evaluate their approach to live broadcasting.
