Miranda Lands Deal for ABC HD Central Switching Center in New York

ABC
Television has placed a major order for Miranda signal-processing and -monitoring
equipment for its HD Central Switching Center (CSC) in New York. The new facility
will be the primary central routing and signal-processing installation for all
of ABC’s inbound feeds, internal routing and distribution, and quality-control
monitoring.
“One of
the big challenges of this project was simplifying the complexity of ABC’s
incoming-feed system for the team of operators, especially as they’re often
working under the pressure of live events and breaking news,” says Michel
Proulx, CTO at Miranda Technologies. “Our system addresses this using a new and
advanced GUI-based control panel, which has been highly adapted for the
functions of the Central Switching Center.”
The
signal processing is based on Miranda’s new XVP-3901 single-card 3-Gbps/HD/SD
video and audio processor. XVP processors will be used for converting and
conditioning feeds from ABC’s Washington news bureau, the studios at Times
Square, along with other news and special-events feeds arriving on satellite
and fiber links. In addition to correcting level and delay issues, the
processors will perform Dolby E decoding and up/down/cross conversion with
independent HD/3-Gbs and SD outputs.
“There
will be hundreds of cards in this system, but our new remote control panel will
provide fast access to individual cards and will show only what is most
relevant to a specific operator,” adds Proulx.
Alongside
these remote control panels, each operator station will also include a Miranda
iControl monitoring desktop, which provides a highly graphical view of the
signal path, along with streaming video and status information about each
device in the chain. The iControl system will help operators identify problems
and also serve as a powerful QC tool by displaying an audio/video waveform for
the signal being processed.
The New
York facility will include a large video monitoring wall, based on 20 large
flat-panel displays fed by Kaleido-X multi-viewers. The monitor wall will
display 300 sources, selected from approximately 800 available signals. The
Kaleido-X system will be tightly integrated with a large matrix router, which
will allow the monitor-wall system to sense router assignments and display
assignment names. The monitor wall will also display alarms and signal-processor
status information, such as abnormally high gain and delay settings.