In recent months, Caracol concluded the first stage of the project with the inauguration of two studios of 500 square meters each. The engineer Yesid Guerra, from the technical direction of Caracol Televisión, served as a luxury guide in our visit to the studios where at that time the scenography was mounted for Pecados Capitales, in one, and for a telenovela still without a name in the other.
"We have built two studios of 500 meters free each," Guerra tells us as an introduction, "with storage areas for light equipment and cranes, a warehouse for each studio and, in half of the two studios, there is what we call the equipment control room. There we have eight racks with all the electronics of the two masters." Today there is a single master's degree installed and the other is enabled with a mobile unit. The equipment control room – with its eight racks of patch panels, routers and intercoms – allows any of the studios to be working with a mobile unit and the other to work with a master's degree. "We have a patch panel that allows us to cross the cameras for one studio or another."
The design of the studies was carried out between the engineers of Caracol and the firm Pizano Pradilla. The electronics part was designed by Carlos Fernández, one of the characters who knows the most about this business in Latin America.
Precisely, one of the points that Guerra highlights is that of the modularity of the equipment control center and the masters, which arose from discussions between the snail engineers and Carlos Fernández. "We have tried to make everything very practical and what we are looking for is ease of operation. I don't know of another studio that offers that modularity. Generally the studies have their master control for each study. Carlos Fernández told us that this design gave more operability to the studios since it allowed the cameras to be intertwined on one side and the other. And it also facilitates communication with the rest of the project. It is easier to link these two studios from the fiber control center with the rest of the buildings that are projected. The other way would be to get a routing system from each master's degree."
These studios have been designed to produce dramatized but other types of programs are also made (when we visited, they had just dismantled a debate set of political candidates). Each studio has three cameras, which is what is used in a dramatized, but up to 10 CCUs can be installed in the equipment control room and directed to a single studio. The debate took place with six cameras and the grid was used more widely.
