Bram van Aar designs, builds and analyses networks for live broadcast and AV. ST 2110, Dante, AES67, Ravenna and Milan — from the cable drawing to the button the operator presses.
Check my availabilityAn IP installation rarely fails on a single layer. I take the route from drawing to working gallery in one pair of hands, so the design, the switch configuration and the operation all share the same assumptions.
Block diagrams and signal paths in VidCAD, including cable schedules and patch layout.
Spine-leaf, VLAN and IP plan, multicast addressing, bandwidth and redundancy.
Arista, Netgear or Cisco: PIM-SSM and IGMP, QoS, PTP profiles, MLAG.
Walking the flows, measuring PTP stability, deliberately failing path A or B.
Cerebrum, VSM or Q-SYS: panels, salvos and logic the crew will actually use.
Multiviewers, converters, KVM, mixers and routers configured and handed over.
Not every job starts from scratch. Often there is a system that behaves almost all of the time, with one fault a week that nobody can reproduce and that there is never time for between shows. I come in on that existing system, measure what is really happening and deliver an explanation instead of a hunch.
I start with the drawings and configurations that exist, and with the people who operate the system every day — they usually know exactly when it goes wrong. Then I measure in the running system: flows and bandwidth, PTP stability, IGMP and multicast behaviour, error counters and buffers on the switches, and what the control layer is actually sending.
You get a report with the findings, the measurements behind them and a proposal for the fix, separating what can be repaired today from what asks for a change in the design. I can carry that out myself, or hand it to your own engineers. Also when the system isn't mine and several suppliers are involved.
Sound familiar? Then there is something to measure.
Vendor-independent, with a preference for equipment that has proven itself in a studio, an OB truck or a theatre.
A selection from fifteen years of systems integration. I don't name clients on the site — in a conversation I'll gladly tell you exactly what I did where.
Design and delivery of the AV infrastructure for parliamentary chambers, in the Netherlands and abroad. Video and audio from every room transported, routed, broadcast and recorded reliably — with the transparency requirements and the continuity that come with that work.
Building television studios for one of the larger broadcasters: from signal path and cable plan to the configuration of routers, multiviewers and the control surface that gets the studio on air every day.
Increasingly in venues: Dante and AES67 networks for audio, video distribution between hall, foyer and control room, and connections for visiting productions. Operation that works for changing crews who have no time to learn the system first.
Various projects for integrators, broadcasters and facility companies: network designs, commissioning on location, and rescuing installations where the audio or the video almost works.
I trained at Sound & Vision with a specialisation in video engineering and started on the floor as a vision engineer, shading cameras at sports events. That work is still in there: I know how a gallery runs under time pressure, and what goes wrong when the engineering and the operation don't line up.
For the last fifteen years I have worked in systems integration, with the move from SDI to IP running through all of it. I work independently, often as an extension of an integrator or an in-house technical team: from a few days of switch configuration to guiding a complete studio project.
Send a short description of the system and the timeline. I usually reply the same day.
bram@bramcast.nl