NEWS AND EVENTS
January 19, 2009
RIT & Audio-Video Corp Make History
RELEASE DATE: Jan. 14, 2009 Contact: Michael Starenko
(585) 475-5035
mssetc@rit.edu
Students Build a High-Definition Broadcast Trailer at Rochester Institute of Technology
State-of-the-art HD production trailer built by the students and staff
at Rochester Institute of Technology. Audio-Video Corporation supplied
the equipment and their 65 years of industry experience to meet the
stringent requirements of this project.
Staying at the forefront of technology doesn’t always have to come with a high price tag. Sometimes, innovation—and hard work—can take a dream and bring it to life. At Rochester Institute of Technology, a handful of students and staff built a cutting-edge high-definition production and broadcast trailer in only four months—much less than the industry standard—and at a third of the cost.
The HD broadcast trailer is a full production studio and the only one of its kind in Upstate NY. It’s currently deployed at RIT to broadcast SportsZone Live—a cable sports TV show covering RIT’s home games. But there’s talk of expanding SportsZone Live to cover away games next year and even renting the trailer to other universities.
What makes this project special isn’t just the state-of-the-art technology that the team at RIT put together in a few short months. It’s that students were largely responsible for planning and building the trailer—and for running the show during live broadcasts—all of which gives them invaluable industry experience that they wouldn’t get anywhere else.
“The knowledge that our students have received from this is changing and molding their whole careers,” says James Bober, lead engineer at RIT’s Educational Technology Center Engineering Services. “What students learn in a classroom can only take them so far. What we provide is a down-to-earth application that gives them the edge.”
The genesis of SportsZone Live
Since 2003, RIT, in partnership with Time Warner Cable and ESPN, has aired SportsZone, a weekly half-hour show that showcases the university’s athletic programs.
“For the past couple of years, Time Warner has asked us to provide more content for their sports cable network,” Bober says. “RIT has grown in sports—we’re now a Division I school in hockey, for instance. Time Warner has been interested in broadcasting the games live.”
To do so, RIT needed a production studio. The choice, then, was whether to create such a studio in standard definition or high definition. When discussing how to make it a reality, James Watters, RIT’s senior vice president of finance and administration, chose to fund building the trailer with high-definition capabilities—giving students an unparalleled educational experience, both in building it and running the show.
Building the broadcast trailer
From there, a team of two RIT staff—Lead Engineer James Bober and Media Production Engineer Chuck Canham—and two co-operative education students went to work, planning and designing its needs over the summer. “We had four months to go from concept to completion—normally a nine-to-12-month process in the broadcast industry.” Bober says.
The team had an on-air date to meet—the first men’s hockey game on Oct. 17.
RIT student Darren Hansen, a graduate student in network systems administration, worked with Bober to plan and design the trailer and its components. Hansen drew plans and researched the equipment they’d need for each component of the production studio, such as the switcher, soundboard and cameras.
After Labor Day, they were ready to begin building. Fifth-year electrical engineering student Andrzej Lubaska stepped in. “They handed me the drawings and said, ‘Tell us what we’re missing.’” The first cable was cut mid-September and it was all completed by the first week in October. All told, that took more than 17,000 feet of cables and wires, each hand-terminated, accounted for and meticulously labeled.
Due to the project’s frugal budget, switchers, cameras and other components weren’t purchased off-the-shelf. Instead, by examining what they needed each one to do, they were designed and customized—at a much lower cost. The trailer itself came as an empty, carpeted shell. Even the circuit breakers needed to be upgraded.
Those customizations took innovation and effort, but also came with benefits. “We could have purchased a different camera system, but the Panasonic HD cameras we chose were less expensive provide a lot more functionality,” Lubaska says. “For example, they can be used as standalone Electronic News Gatherers as well. It gives us more flexibility to use the equipment in other applications.”
Even the plasma screen mounts needed modification to be attached to a rack—not something they were originally designed to do. The two Panasonic 50” Plasma screens, used as a monitor wall, can be reconfigured for each event, showing different inputs that are digitally resized, positioned and labeled for the crew. This was made possible by the donation of an upgraded 32-input Harris Predator II multiviewer by Harris Corp.
Hansen designed custom patch bay panels for the side of the truck and came up with a customized circuit for each of the field cameras allowing them to receive return video and tally signals from the trailer. Lubaska used his Electrical Engineering education to finalize the design into an easy-to-implement box. Because the RIT staff members leading the project had industry experience and maintained their connections with others in the field, they were able to provide expert advice on who to turn to when selecting components and working with vendors.
State-of-the-art technological education
For the students working on this project, the experiences they’ve had are ones they wouldn’t otherwise get. “It’s been awesome, being part of such a legitimate broadcasting experience,” Lubaska says. “This is a professional scale project and we, as students, got to design and build it.”
Hansen agrees, “This is a rare opportunity. How many broadcast trucks are build in a year—one or two in the country?”
It’s not just the students who built the trailer that benefit. Student workers on SportsZone Live are also getting a meaningful education.
“SportsZone has been so successful in teaching our students about broadcasting.” says Mark Fragale, Digital Media Producer/Editor and Director of SportsZone Live. “Some of our students have gone on to work at ESPN and I hear reports back that they are well-prepared from their work here. However, we haven’t been able to give them live broadcast TV experience. SportsZone Live fills that void.”
This live experience is benefiting Sophie Scillaci, a third-year advertising and public relations major. She conducts on-air interviews with the players and coach at the end of the game. She’s also the host of the taped SportsZone show.
“SportsZone is the most valuable part of my education. It’s given me a talent reel, hours of footage of myself and experience in how to do the job that I want.” Scillaci says. She plans to pursue broadcast television and on-camera hosting.
“It’s live, there are no takes,” Fragale says. “It’s a lot of pressure and responsibility. I take it for granted after a while because they do so well.”
Trailer stats
24’ long with two separate areas—an 8’x17’ main production area and separate 8’x5’ audio area
Seats 10 people
Runs on 3-phase 60A 120 volt service and has three zones of 45,000 BTU cooling
Equipment
2 Panasonic 50” Plasma flat screens
Panasonic BT-1760 HD reference monitor
Harris Zandar Predator II dual output 32-input multiviewer
Panasonic AJ-RC100G remote control units
Panasonic BT-LH1760P reference monitor and a Harris VTM-2400
Four-channel Clearcom Encore system
24-input GVG “Kayak” 150 HD-SDI switcher
4 Panasonic AJ-HPM110P P2 decks
AJ-SD93 DVC-Pro deck for backup
DNF 4-way ST300-T slow-mo controller
two-channel Harris HD Inscriber G3 with full option set and HD clip playback
Yamaha M7CL 40x16 digital mixer with 8x8 channels of AES audio with SDI audio embedding and de-embedding
2 JBL LSR6325P powered speakers and metering by Wholer
CD player and iPod dock for playback
Mackie 1402 mixer for back up
Clearcom PIC-4702 Program Interrupt Controller
2 Clearcom AB100 stereo IFB boxes
3 Sennheiser HMD280 announcer headsets
Microphones: 9 Crown PCC 160s, 4 Sennhiser K6 series “shotguns,” 2 Shure SM63 interview mics, lavalier, wireless and table microphones
Panasonic BT-1700 HD reference monitor
Harris VTM-2400 waveform/vector monitor
20 Grass Valley HD-SDI distribution amplifiers
5 NTSC to SDI frame synchronizers
Evertz dual HD-SDI / SDI closed caption encoder and corresponding decoders
Ensemble Designs BE-55 Sync Gen
Grass Valley HD protection switch with automatic switchover to an 8x1 HD-SDI backup switcher
5 Panasonic AG-HPX500 P2 HD cameras
Vinten Vision 11 and Vision 100 tripods
Panasonic BT-LH80W HD LCD monitors on MagicArm mounts
Telemetrix Coax-Link system with an HD-SDI option
2x extenders and Fujinon HD 0.6 wide angle adaptors
Fujinon HD 1.5 telephoto adaptors
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