BeckTV Completes Work on Notre Dame’s State-of-the Art, IP-Centric Production Facility

System integrator BeckTV has completed work on the University of Notre Dame’s state-of-the-art production facility, the Rex and Alice A. Martin Media Center, which is one of a handful of live production media centers in the world to boast an all-IP routing infrastructure. Housed within Corbett Family Hall, a brand-new building adjacent to Notre Dame Stadium, the facility significantly extends the university’s capacity and agility in supporting live broadcasts and postproduction.

Production Control Room During Football Game at Notre Dame’s Rex and Alice A. Martin Media Center

“The volume of in-house live production in the college setting is increasing at an exponential rate, with growing demand for content to feed everything from replay boards, to linear broadcasts on the web or cable systems, to live streaming,” says Scott Rinehart, director of broadcast technology at Notre Dame. “This new media center we built along with BeckTV ensures that today — and in the future, as production demands continue to rise — the university and its students can deliver diverse programming, including academics, faith, athletics, and other events, to the broader world with flexibility and sophistication. Throughout this project, BeckTV was an excellent partner in helping us make this exciting and groundbreaking new build a success.”

A new addition to the Notre Dame campus in South Bend, Indiana, the Martin Media Center unites cutting-edge production technologies across the university’s vast campus fiber infrastructure.

Fiber Wiring at the Back of the EXE Router Using 12-strand MPO Fiber Cable at Notre Dame’s Rex and Alice A. Martin Media Center

The new facility itself includes one large studio, one teaching studio, two nine-position production control rooms, two audio control rooms, a camera shading room, a slow-motion replay room, and eight fiber-connected editing suites. An Evertz EXE IP video/audio router at the system core connects spaces in the media center to three additional control rooms and one studio located in the nearby Joyce Center. As a result, the university can use any one of five control rooms as a remote production room for any venue on campus equipped with fiber connectivity.

The IP video router deployment is not the only first for the Notre Dame media center. The facility is also among the first to install Riedel Communications’ AES67 intercom panels, as well as Riedel’s brand-new Bolero AES67 wireless intercom. The audio control rooms have Axia Fusion mixers deployed utilizing AES67, which allows for sharing of audio between the router, intercom, and mixer while remaining within the IP network switch environment.

With the benefit of IP-based operations and more flexible access to its production resources campus-wide, Notre Dame can undertake a greater number of productions more cost-effectively and without the need for production trucks, increase its capture and playback ability, and offer high-caliber production facilities to both internal and external clients.

“Notre Dame is one of the pioneers tapping into the potential of IP routing with its new media center. This install represents an exciting step forward for live-production possibilities on a college campus — or anywhere high-volume and high-quality remote production is needed,” said Brendan Cline, project engineer at BeckTV. “This project is an exciting example of how IP-routing technology naturally creates a dynamic production environment and how this can leverage the many valuable tools and technologies that exist in the IP space. With a future-resistant infrastructure and capacity to scale, Notre Dame will be able to accommodate its constantly growing production demands.”

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