When Pacific Television Center (PacTV), an independent global transmission and production company, decided to renovate the master control room at its Los Angeles facility, it sought to enhance the company’s monitoring and transmission capabilities significantly. In turn, this would support the facility’s move to complete HD operations.
Over the last few years, PacTV’s worldwide client roster has grown significantly, requiring increased staff and monitoring resources. To address these issues, the company has transformed its facility into a functional space that enables the PacTV team to collaborate more effectively on multiple projects.
The renovation in Los Angeles was also a catalyst for the company’s planned global renovation, which would include its sister facilities in New York and London.
Where the previous MCR housed just two workstations, the renovated one now features five, along with 12 screens. This has allowed PacTV to bump the number of feeds it monitors from 64 up to 162. Once the monitoring wall in the space is fully populated, the company expects it will be able to monitor up to 249 feeds. The circuits it currently monitors in Los Angeles include such top-tier city hubs as New York; Washington, D.C.; Atlanta; London; Sydney; Auckland; and Toronto, among others.
Among the other pieces of equipment the new MCR incorporates are new, custom-made High Tech Furnishings consoles and multiple Evertz 7867VIPA multi-image display processors, as well as an OmniTek HD waveform scope for measuring Dolby E streams. In addition, PacTV will now be able to monitor its feeds using four new quality-control stations, contributing a new level of productivity to the facility’s workflow.
PacTV recruited Veneklasen Associates to design the acoustics in two of its facility’s three studios in Los Angeles. The studios have been fully upgraded to HD, soundproofed with new acoustical treatments and equipped with new Sony HXC100K HD cameras.
PacTV commissioned the architectural firm Robert Ward & Associates to establish and maintain a consistent design across the additional PacTV facilities. According to Robert Ward, principal architect at Robert Ward & Associates, this presented its own challenges.
“When we were asked to look at the development of the MCR at PacTV Los Angeles, we knew this would be challenging, as we were tasked with designing a state-of-the-art facility while keeping the existing MCR up and operational,” he says. “Fortunately, the team at PacTV was a dedicated and resilient crew. They were able to work around the most difficult of our construction issues.”
“PacTV started with one outbound loop to Australia,” says Richard Neri, president, PacTV. “With the growth of circuits, we needed to rethink the way we monitored connectivity. We had to take our facility to the next level, and this redesign has done just that. By increasing our monitoring capabilities, we can easily keep our clients up to date on all projects.
