Central London Studios / Associated Press – TV Studio Integration, London, UK

THE BRIEF: TV STUDIO INTEGRATION IN LONDON

Fully HD-capable studios located in the heart of central London, AP’s new facility needed to be state-of-the-art. They wanted to provide a real-life cityscape backdrop rather than green-screen, with a number of different-sized studios. The twelfth floor at New Zealand House gave the perfect 16-Camera aspect, overlooking London’s most recognisable landmarks, including Buckingham Palace, Pall Mall, Trafalgar Square, the London Eye, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster and Big Ben. AP commissioned C2S to design, build and maintain a five-studio news, play-out and edit facility, with multi-camera, single-camera and robotic-camera studios.

THE SOLUTION

This TV studio integration project in London covered the full lifecycle of the facility: design, build and ongoing maintenance. C2S delivered an HD infrastructure built around Evertz video processing and routing, Sony cameras on Bradley Engineering robotic heads, and three control rooms equipped with Ross Video vision mixers and graphics. Edit suites are connected directly to transmission, and HD-SDI fibre links to the AP switching facility allow the studios to send and receive feeds from anywhere in the world.

SPECIFICATION
  • HD infrastructure with multi-definition Evertz video processing and Evertz 962 video router
  • Sony HXC-100 Triax cameras and Sony HDC-P1 cameras on Bradley Engineering robotic heads
  • Three individual control rooms (studio 1/studio 2/studios 3, 4 and 5), with Ross Video vision mixers and graphics, a combination of Soundcraft and Allen & Heath audio mixers, Bradley Engineering robotic controller, Grass Valley T2 DDRs and Sony HVR-1500 VTs
  • Apple Final Cut Pro 7 workstations with Sony HVR-1500 ingest/record VTs and the ability to play out/record directly to and from transmission
  • Custom-designed and fabricated technical furniture
  • Custom-designed studio furniture with flexibility to personalise based on client requirements
  • Remote colour temperature switchable LED studio lighting
  • Five HD-SDI fibre in and five HD-SDI out, to and from A P switching facility to send and receive from anywhere in the world