The MindLabs research and education center builds its workflow around Blackmagic

Blackmagic URSA Broadcast G2 cameras and Blackmagic ATEM Constellation 8K mixers back up the studio at the MindLabs research center, home of Fontys University of Applied Sciences.

Mindlabs, through its television studio, offers to prepare students to interact with “cutting-edge technologies”. The training center had a previous facility that had operated for a decade, but, as Sjoerd van den Bersselaar, audiovisual hardware technician at Fontys Journalism, confirms, it had reached “the end of its useful life”.

This transition led MindLabs to integrate a flexible and adaptable studio, following the most pressing trends in the world of multimedia productions. At the heart of the new facility is an ATEM Constellation 8K mixer, along with an ATEM 2 M/E Advanced Panel device for media mixing, and a Smart Videohub 40×40 12G matrix switcher that provides the ability to distribute and manage signals: “The Constellation gives us the flexibility to expand into UHD and beyond down the line and build on solid foundations. Future proofing has never felt so good, what a piece of hardware the ATEM is,” says van den Bersselaar.

his control room is connected via SDI 12G technology to a technological support room where there is equipment such as the HyperDeck Studio HD Mini for recording content and three HyperDeck Studio Mini units for processing graphics and information superimposed on the images.

URSA Studio cameras on set

Content capture in the MindLabs studio is handled by four URSA Broadcast G2 cameras equipped with Blackmagic URSA Studio Viewfinder G2 viewfinders, plus Blackmagic Studio Fiber Converter and Blackmagic Studio Fiber Converter units to provide signals, power and fiber optic communication. Inside the main control room there is also an ATEM Camera Control Panel with a SmartScope Duo 4K monitor and a color-accurate production monitor to process shadows on the cameras remotely.

Students upload the elements via software, which automatically distributes various resources to the computer package and to the appropriate workstations, ready for the students to use. “In addition to our custom scripts that run the studio, the presets in the ATEM software have played a crucial role in our automation, allowing us to control the HyperDecks, media players and macros via the ATEM 2 M/E panel. Before we’d have done this all manually, so this saves us a lot of time,” adds van den Bersselaar, who is confident that this new studio will last for many years to come: “We initially used first generation Blackmagic equipment in our previous studio, and that hardware remained operational for years. The durability and versatility of those systems instilled confidence in the team.”