West Post Digital moves its busy edit facility in two days

Imagine Friday afternoon pulling the plug on a busy 6000sq-ft edit operation, moving all the equipment to a new 20,000sqft facility, and being ready to serve clients on Monday morning. That’s what happened at West Post Digital.

Moving to a new custom-built facility and expanding system capability gave West Post an opportunity to upgrade to a high-tech routing system.

Prior to the move, the new machine room was outfitted with 21 racks, almost doubling the old capacity, providing space for new gear and leaving guest positions. Network Electronics’ VikinX 128 x 128 modular router was installed with three cards: a 32 x 32 SD-only card, and two 32 x 32 HD cards, leaving 32 x 32 for future expansion.

The video router can distribute dual-link 4:4:4 HD and also allow dual rate equipment without separate SD and HD inputs and outputs. The facility routes time code and RS-422 machine control through Network’s Compact series routers. The routers are PC-based, programmable, network configurable and can be controlled from any area in the facility. A week before the move, Network’s technical team came to the new location loaded the database, tested the unit to make sure it switched properly and provided training.

Several nonlinear systems reside in the machine room and are used remotely through Gefen Cat 5 extenders. Cat 5 extends to the keyboard, video and mouse in the edit rooms, which are equipped with program and status monitors, a client monitor, two VGA monitors and test instruments. Each bay can call on any edit system. The router has a lockout function, so an editor cannot step on another program.

The da Vinci color correction presented a major challenge to a fully embedded system. There is a two-frame delay in the color correction system from the input to output, and West Post needed to listen to the program audio and have the time code in sync. Because the system could not handle audio and time code, it had to be delayed externally. The router sends the source SD or HD video to a deembedder on its way to the system SD or HD inputs. The de-embedded AES is then sent through a delay and through a re-embedder, where it is combined, in sync, with the color corrected output of the da Vinci. The source LTC time code is simultaneously sent through a delay unit and then along with the da Vinci output shows up together in sync as a router source for distribution to destination DVRs and monitoring in the edit bays.

The embedded HD and SD routing system makes editor and client time more productive, providing greater flexibility to schedule edit bays and giving West Post Digital more system capacity to grow.