The Project

With competition for viewers at a fever pitch, broadcasters are always looking for ways to distinguish themselves. One way some of them are doing it is by upping the ante on studio and set design, adding elaborate features that create an immersive experience for the audience, and LED lighting often plays a crucial role.

One example is a major sports network that is home to more than 20 shows, including its signature live nightly studio show. In order to accommodate new programs, the network built a new 8,000-square-foot studio that combines elements of a traditional sports venue with the latest in modern TV technology.

The Challenge

Throughout its history, one major sports network has continued to add shows and expand its live programming. Until recently, the network was producing all of its shows in only three studios inside its headquarters building. It was a juggling act indeed, so when the broadcaster decided to add another live studio program to its lineup, it opted to build a new studio as well.

With no more space for another studio in its headquarters building, the broadcaster leased the 40,000-square-foot warehouse next door, where it would build an 8,000-square-foot state-of-the-art studio. The new studio would have nearly 1,400 square feet of high-resolution LED displays and 14 back-to-back 55-inch monitors. Instead of building a second control room, the broadcaster would connect its new studio via fiber and cable to the existing control room next door, which meant there would have to be a lighting control system and power platform that could manage the LED fixtures remotely between the two buildings and ensure failover in the event of power loss in one of the buildings. And because studio construction couldn’t start right away, there would only be three months to do all the work in time for the start of the season.

The Solution

The new studio uses at least five multicamera studio positions and cutting-edge technology — from hanging video displays to augmented-reality graphics — adaptable to any show, story, or team. There are more than 1,100 12-inch by 16-inch LED tiles installed in different configurations to create the 1,400 square feet of wall displays. Images on the LED walls precisely track the camera’s movement in order to give the perception that the people on the set are inside a sports complex with a breathtaking view. The idea is for the studio to appear gigantic. In addition, the studio’s distinguishing feature is that set of 55-inch monitors suspended from the ceiling. The monitors can be rotated, raised, and lowered in synchronized timing and according to specific show content and direction.

This impressive studio design required a sophisticated lighting network and power-control platform to accommodate the massive amount of LED equipment. The Lighting Design Group (LDG) designed and installed the system, which comprises four LynTec RPC panels specified to control 294 lighting circuits on the grid and walls, powering 540 energy-efficient LED lighting fixtures.

With the addition of the new studio, it became necessary to convert the broadcaster’s lighting control system from a closed, small-business network to an enterprise-grade managed network. The original network controlled three studios in the headquarters building from a console and backup server in the control room. However, when the new studio was added in a second building, LDG added infrastructure that decentralized the control system in terms of equipment location and backups, but maintained centralized control from the existing control room. By locating the primary lighting control server in one building and the backup server in the other, and then networking them together, operators can maintain lighting control in the event of a failure in one building or the other.

Now that LED lights have become more saturated, they offer better, more intense color than ever. What’s more, they consume less power and reduce heat loads, which saves money and reclaims much-needed space since ducts, fan units, and chiller sizes can be smaller. With those advantages, the trend is to use more LED lighting fixtures in broadcast installations. But there has to be a way to turn all of that LED equipment on and off, and doing that requires a power platform. Hence the LynTec RPC panels.

LynTec’s motorized breaker panels control power to the lighting system in the broadcaster’s new studio, allowing the system to cycle power to the fixtures in the studio via DMX. In the past, conventional incandescent fixtures were fed power directly from dimmers; when the dimmers were brought down to zero, not only was the intensity zero, but the power consumption was zero as well. In an LED world, fixtures not only consume much less power, but the power they do consume has nothing to do with dimming them. Power is needed only as a supply to run the fixture as one would run an appliance or a computer. Dimming is controlled via data. So when the lighting director brings a fixture to zero intensity, that fixture is still consuming power. In order to turn the fixture off completely, one must shut power off to the fixture. The most cost-effective way to do that is with a relay panel. The LynTec panels are intelligent motorized breaker panels that not only manage power to the LED fixtures, but grant individual control over every breaker, providing the flexibility that previously would have come from a dimming system. In this way, the lighting control system can cycle power to individual circuits to give an occasional hard reboot to the LED fixtures or to enable service in one area while maintaining lighting in another.

The trend toward LEDs in lighting design not only saves power when coupled with LynTec’s intelligent power platform, but, according to LDG Systems Project Manager Tony Siniscalco, it also helps to future-proof the data network. Whereas before, LDG would have designed a distributed DMX network with five-pin XLR receptacles in the field, now the firm has begun designing lighting systems as lighting networks that take either DMX or a lighting network protocol signal down any data line. That’s because lighting control systems have increasingly become small, closed networks, and fixtures have become mini computers. DMX receptacles are now net taps that home-run back to a lighting control rack and land in patch bays. It’s possible to patch DMX from rack-mounted gateways on a network or patch a network signal directly from a switch.

“Consoles are now clients on the network, and control is handled from a lighting control server, usually with a full tracking backup server in the same or remote location for redundancy,” Siniscalco said. “By designing in this method, we believe we are future-proofing our lighting control system infrastructure so that at any time in the future when upgrades are needed, we only have to update the software rather than rebuild the entire system.”

LDG applied that logic and methodology to our broadcaster’s new studio. LDG added “client” stations to both the new studio and the main control room, allowing for remote access to the control servers in the new studio from the control room. Also, in the event of a primary failure in the control room, the lighting director can push a button on the KVM and access the backup server in the other building, which means he or she can remain in control without having to leave the control room.

Results

Construction of the new studio took just over two months, and now the facility is home to three daily studio shows. LynTec’s RPC panels provide intelligent power management of the studio’s massive LED video walls and the specialized, sophisticated network that controls them. In a feat of design and engineering, it is this precise power management and control over the LED fixtures that makes the studio’s signature look possible — and gives the network’s audiences a one-of-a-kind experience.