ATG Danmon has completed a studio control room upgrade for ITN at their Gray’s Inn Road, London, headquarters.
The project included the integration of a latest-generation production switcher, control surface and production server. Transition to the new system was completed over a single weekend to ensure continuity of the facility’s daily transmission schedule.
“The ITN engineering and production teams decided to replace a legacy vision switcher and related equipment with a latest generation Ross Carbonite Black vision control platform, TouchDrive operating panel, Abekas Tria Express Duet server and Ultrix router,” comments Jonathan Hughes, ATG Danmon Head of Systems Integration. “A key challenge was the need to ensure that the upgrade could be completed without impacting the facility’s normal schedule which in this case included daily news presentations plus Monday through Friday magazine shows.
“As a Ross Diamond Elite partner, we were able to design, deliver, integrate and commission a complete system plus ancillary equipment. Production requirements included the ability for the switcher to interact with the control systems. Graphic cues and spot-on audio cues are controlled directly from the vision switcher which is linked to the sound desk. The vision switcher also interfaces to Avid iNews Command automation for clip replay, allowing the production team to set up and build the shows.
“Based on our long experience of time-critical projects, we pre-installed and tested the complete system into an onsite development environment so that daily studio and control-room operations could proceed without interruption. The development area was also used for preliminary operator familiarisation.
“We were then able to perform a complete changeover on a Saturday followed by full testing and in-situ training on the Sunday prior to the new system going live on the Monday morning. Everything went fully to plan. The new infrastructure is future proof and can be upgraded from HD to UHD and SDR to HDR if or when required.”
The Ross Carbonite Black vision control platform incorporates four independent media player channels which are available switcher-wide. Stills, logos and animated graphics are played out from on-board memory and can be loaded via USB storage devices. The attached TouchDrive control panel incorporates 25 crosspoint buttons on a 15.6 inch touch screen plus three mix/effects control rows. Operators can enable functions such as panel mapping without having to step through menus. Selected menus are complemented with touch gestures.
The Ross Abekas Tria Express Duet production server can store over 38 hours of HD 1080/59.94i video at 100 Mbit/s with up to eight tracks of digital audio embedded in each video channel.
Occupying 2U, the Ross Ultrix router includes 16 × 16 HD BNC plus two auxiliary I/O ports, expandable to 72 x 72. The integral Ultrimix allows routing, mixing and processing of all embedded audio inputs plus the ability to support up to 512 x 512 discrete mono audio inputs.
