Window to the World

There are so many things that I want to be able to say about everything that is going on around here... too bad I only have time for short posts!

I wanted to start on the equipment side of our room renovation with the focal point of the room - the monitor wall.

Currently, the CanesVision control room is full of rack-mounted CRT source monitors, ranging from 9" to 24" in size, most black and white, a few (graphics and preview/program) in color. The footprint is staggering...

Technology has come a long way in the near-ten years since this room was built, and the monitor wall is getting a definite upgrade! We will be utilizing a total of five NEC LCD4615 displays for our monitor wall sources. To "break up" the monitors into usable sources, we will be using the Harris Centrio Multiviewer software. We have already downloaded the software to be able to lay out the wall, but haven't had much of a chance to figure it out since the team is still going strong in the post-season (incessant knocking on any surface that closely resembles wood can be heard...)

The nice thing about the multiviewer setup is that it is custom configurable with virtually no limit to the number of layouts you can design. So, there can be a layout for hockey with separate director and td, hockey with a single director/td, basketball configured both ways, football, monster trucks, graduation... you can have a different layout based on the number of inputs and type of event, without having to physically patch anything. Just drag, drop, save and import :)

In addition to the monitor wall, there will be additional multiviewer outputs (all driven from the same Centrio) at the video shading position and the producer's position. Currently, our producer can not see anything but our program feed. Now, the producer will be able to see as many inputs as we can squeeze onto his monitor :)

There are so many other things I want to talk about, but I don't want to bore anyone to death. So, for now, this is good enough...

If you have any questions, feel free to post a comment and we'll try to figure out the answer ;)