TV Cultura nears completion of major digital, HD migration

TV Cultura, a publicly funded broadcast network in Sao Paulo, Brazil, has been at work since June 2008 migrating its main broadcast and production facility to a file-based, digital, HD production infrastructure. The project was initiated to comply with the country’s government mandate to begin broadcasting digitally in 2008.

As part of a multiphase project, which is scheduled to be completed this month, TV Cultura has installed a wide variety of Grass Valley equipment that is now operational throughout the TV Cultura main broadcast and production facility. After an initial investment of more than $5 million, TV Cultura has expanded the project with an additional purchase of Grass Valley equipment valued at about $2.5 million.

The latest stage of the project includes a new news studio equipped with four LDK 4000 Elite HD cameras; a second technical control room with a Trinix HD router and dozens of Grass Valley signal conversion products; and three K2 media servers added to eight existing Grass Valley servers for program ingest and playout.

Additionally, the news department has upgraded its editing platform with 10 Aurora Edit HD workstations; a new production facility will broadcast the UNIVESP channel using three LDK 4000 Elite HD cameras, two K2 media servers, a Kayak HD200 production switcher, dozens of GeckoFlex modular products and a Jupiter routing control system. The existing production area will be upgraded with three LDK 4000 Elite cameras to allow virtual set production.