Westpac Stadium, a 34,500-seat multipurpose facility in Wellington, New Zealand, is upgrading its video production capabilities with a complete retrofit of its control room.
At the heart of the overhaul is a Broadcast Pix Granite 5000 video production system, which feeds video and graphics to two large replay screens installed at the north and south ends of the stadium.
Westpac maintains a busy schedule of concerts and sporting events and will host at least seven matches during the Rugby World Cup 2011 later this year. Before the upgrade, the 4:3 video production was stretched to fit the 16:9 replay screens.
With the Granite 5000, productions are produced in HD, and then downconverted to widescreen SD for stadium replay due to a fiber infrastructure that can only support SD. The two-M/E capability of the Granite 5000 also enables Westpac to display a different presentation on each screen.
