Crystal Cathedral shines with an all-new HD infrastructure

Robert Schuller’s “Hour of Power” is produced at the Crystal Cathedral, a TV studio for televised congregational Christian worship. Recently, the program enlisted systems integrator TV Magic to design and install a new HD production infrastructure for the Crystal Cathedral.

Five Grass Valley LDK4000 1080i HD cameras and various switching sources record through seven Avid HD Adrenaline nonlinear editing systems to a Unity centralized storage system. This allows staff to take advantage of Avid’s multicam editing features, with editing of program content beginning immediately following each Sunday service. Due to the live nature of the program, one challenge was to place all seven Avid systems into record mode simultaneously.

TV Magic worked as a technical liaison with Avid and other manufacturers to integrate the facility’s new production gear in an effi cient workfl ow. The systems integrator also installed a Grass Valley Kayak HD two M/E digital production switcher. One M/E is used with an auxiliary panel to provide switching and keyed graphics for presentation and image magnifi cation on the Cathedral’s Jumbotron.

Within the control room, an Evertz MVP multi-image display and monitoring processor feeds four Panasonic HD plasma displays, allowing production personnel to monitor all switcher sources, previews, programs and Jumbotron feeds. The system supports display of up to nine cameras.

Today, production staff shoot the live service and send all camera feeds, ISO feeds and the director’s cut to the Avid system just 10 minutes after the service. The seven Avid systems capture all video, and on Monday, they serve as individual edit bays for work on different pieces of the show.

The Avid systems feed two virtual edit bays, one equipped with Digidesign’s Pro Tools HD for sweetened audio layback. The other Avid systems ingest archived material from tape and output rough-cut versions of the program for audio sweetening and approvals. All of the Avid systems are situated in the machine room located in a different building; editors use an Avocent KVM switching system to work on these systems remotely.

Live audio is captured directly into a Pro Tools HD multitrack session. A mixed-down version is provided to the remote Avid systems. Edited versions are provided back to audio for sweetening. Once audio is completed, it is laid back directly into the timeline using drag-and-drop functionality.

The HD upgrade allows the “Hour of Power” production team to deliver a muchimproved SD signal to broadcasters and highquality programming to the growing number of TV stations making the leap to HD.