BBC STUDIOS' STUDIO FOUR GOES HD

BBC Studios - part of BBC Resources Ltd., a wholly-owned commercial subsidiary of the BBC - has selected 165 Crystal Vision interface boards for the HD upgrade of its Studio Four at BBC Television Centre in London.

BBC Studios is investing nearly two million pounds in HD cameras, lenses, vision and monitoring equipment to support its entertainment production customers. Studio Four comprises 8,000 square feet and is home to "A Question of Sport", "The Jonathan Ross Show" and ITV1's "The Alan Titchmarsh Show". The new Studio Four is designed to work in any of the current HD and SD formats, can produce HD and SD simultaneously and includes Dolby E encoding.

The up and down conversion is being provided by 20 of Crystal Vision's Up-and-down up/down/cross converters and 13 of the Q-Down123 short-delay down converters. HD signals are distributed using 17 of the HDDA105N and HDDA111N, while synchronising is handled by three SYN HD, as well as five of the new SYNNER-E HD synchronisers. Audio embedding and de-embedding is being done using 26 TANDEM HD-21. The Standard Definition boards being used in the installation include ADDEC-210 decoders, ALLDAC and MON210 encoders, VDA110R and DDA108 distribution amplifiers, SYN102 and SYNNER-E synchronisers and the TANDEM-200 audio embedder/de-embedder.

The boards are mainly housed in Indigo 4SE 4U frames, which hold up to 24 modules each. Control comes from the Statesman PC software, with BBC Studios using the Signal Path add-on - which provides a view of the system based on the way the boards are used rather than their rack location - to graphically monitor its signal paths.

The equipment was ordered and installed by Dega Broadcast Systems, with the studio due to go on air in September.

Studio Four is the third studio that BBC Studios has upgraded to HD. Crystal Vision was also selected for the HD upgrade of Studio One in 2006, which included 72 of the Up-and-down up/down/cross converters.