Vegas PBS
Vegas PBS, the Public Broadcasting Service station serving the greater Las Vegas area, has opened a new, green-designed broadcast facility that has recently earned the coveted LEED Gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. Vegas PBS is licensed through the Trustees of the Clark County School District, which occupies half of the new building, expanding the station’s mission well beyond PBS duties to include a virtual high school and educational media center. The various uses of the facility are diverse, encompassing everything from acting as a Level 2 Homeland Security site and providing an emergency response support system, to handling a homework program for local students, hosting local police seminars and providing an educational platform for students looking to make broadcast engineering a career. Designed by JMA Architecture Studios with AZCAR for systems integration, the station supplies programming for six broadband channels, one HD and two SD over-the-air channels and six cable channels, and it features a 2Gig WAN.
To handle the multiple audio missions of the facility while also meeting the needs of engineers and operators with greatly varying skill levels, Vegas PBS has installed two 32 x 8 fader Solid State Logic C10 HD consoles in Studios 1 and 2 tied together with an SSL MORSE router and four MORSE Stage Boxes. Two of the Stage Boxes perform SDI embedder/de-embedder duties in the main machine room, while the other two are located on each of the studio floors. SSL Alpha-Link Live units in the machine room and in each control room handle local source I/O. Both studio control rooms are identical, allowing for shared resources and maximum studio flexibility. The C10 HD has a small footprint (ideal for the compact control rooms at Vegas PBS), is convection-cooled (obviating the need for extra HVAC load capacity for a dedicated machine room) and offers impressively low power consumption. The C10 HD is fully compatible with the station’s Ross OverDrive automated production control system.
Vegas PBS needed to take into consideration the wide range of console operators that would range from professionals to high school students working on a project. The C10 HD offers four levels of system availability that allows an engineer to effectively lock out console resources. The advanced audio engineer might enjoy full access, while an untrained student could be restricted to only riding faders without the capability of unraveling a production setup. The console has a Dialogue Automix feature that allows a user to set the relative levels of up to 16 microphones for a talk show-style setup. The system auto-senses activity on each channel, opens and closes channels automatically, and ensures that the overall gain of the combined signal remains constant to prevent the ambient background noise from fluctuating. The C10 also has a 5.1 upmix feature; a simple to operate mix-minus setup; and the Eyeconix display system, where a picture or graphic can be inserted for easy audio source identification — again to accommodate the various engineering skill levels. Students participate on all levels of production, including editing, camera and audio.
- New studio or RF technology — station
Submitted by Solid State LogicDesign teamAZCAR: Steve Weiner, bus. dev. rep.; Al Marlin, proj. mgr.; Hakim Kharbut, lead eng.; Adam Stoddard, installation supervisor
JMA Architecture Studios: Michael Crowe, lead architect
Vegas PBS: George Molnar, dir. of eng.; Chris Cullen and Joe Cordova, telecom. specialistsTechnology at workApple: Final Cut Pro production editing
Avid: Production editing, Sundance Digital Titan broadcast automation
Chyron: HyperX graphics
Clear-Com: Eclipse intercom
Evertz: Channel branding, distribution amplifiers, master control
Harris: Videotek rasterizers and off-air monitoring
Marshall: Video monitors
Omneon: Program storage and playback
Panasonic: Video monitors
Ross Video: OverDrive production automation, Vision production switcher
SAGE ENDEC: Emergency alert system
Sencore: IRDs for satellite
Solid State Logic: C10 HD consoles with MORSE router and Alpha Link Live I/O audio consoles
Sony: 8000 production switcher, video cameras, video monitors
TANDBERG: Encoding and multiplexing
Volicon: Air logger
Wohler: Audio monitoring
© 2010 Penton Media, Inc.
