Media 3 designs luxurious broadcast facility in Midtown Manhattan

Media 3 just completed a live broadcast facility elegantly disguised as a luxurious Midtown executive club. Working with TPG Planning and Design, Media 3 designed the facility with maximum flexibility and sophistication in mind to accommodate a clientele that regularly includes heads of state, CEOs and celebrities.

The new 16,000sq-ft facility supports two control rooms, fi ve studios, broadcast service panels and 24 fi ber tie lines to Ascent Media’s Fifth Avenue hub. Every source and destination throughout the facility is on a Miranda router, eliminating the need for any hard patching. From anywhere in the facility, guests can monitor up to four signals simultaneously to keep current on world events that could affect their impending appearance.

The facility’s four live-shot studios are prelit and always ready to go at a moment’s notice. The facility is designed around Media 3’s BureauCam live-shot system. BureauCam is a fully engineered studio solution in a single control panel that reduces engineering time and cost. More importantly, nontechnical users can easily operate it.

The live-shot control room is capable of controlling up to eight local or remote BureauCam studios simultaneously. The latest BureauCam BCS-3500 master control unit replaces up to 50 individual pieces of equipment per studio and integrates robotic camera positioning and shot control with presets, on-air switching, integrated CCU, audio/video routing and distribution, external lighting, and machine control.

In addition, it has communications intercom features, such as dual internal IFBs and external IFP insert points. It also offers signal monitoring, including audio and video output level indicators, communications and connectivity status indicators, a programmable character inserter for location ID, and an internal CATV tuner to monitor on-air return signals. Remote operation is handled via network or dial-up, and all real-time diagnostics are accessed via its integrated Web server. The main output of the BureauCam can be simply connected to the fi ber transmitter or uplink. After adding a couple of pots lines for IFB and PL, it’s ready to go.

The facility also houses a 20ft x 30ft production studio. The adjacent all-digital control room is based on a Broadcast Pix 2100 switcher with four keyers, three DVEs and chromakeys, an Inscriber character generator with animations, clip store, still store and logo generator. DigiBeta and DVD burners are integrated for live-to-tape and tape-and-ship applications.

Designing the facility around BureauCam has allowed most of the racks to remain relatively unpopulated and available for future expansion and customer co-locating.