The Press Association provides up-to-the minute news reports to customers around the world in a variety of text and data formats. The company recently commissioned Interactive View to provide a new broadcast studio position within the open plan newsroom to present news, entertainment and business summaries for websites and other digital platforms. The full requirement was for a mini-studio complete with camera, Autocue, lighting and high-resolution video wall backdrop linked to The Press Association’s own in-house edit suite.

Interactive View specified the DZ-Wall from Elport EU for use in this project. The configuration of this DZ-Wall combines sixteen 19” XGA, LCD-TFT screens to produce a 79” diagonal, high-brightness, high-resolution, extremely slim display with sophisticated integral video/data processing and scaling software. It provides a highly flexible and attractive display as a backdrop to the presenter that can be changed on-the-fly to show different screen layouts; from sixteen individual images through to one large one. A major criteria was that the screen had to be sufficiently bright to be viewable under studio lighting. It also to be unobtrusive in a busy, crowded open-plan office and at just 3.3” deep certainly achieves that aim.

In this installation, an operator using DZ-Wall’s control program is able to dynamically configure the entire wall to show any combination of up to twenty incoming video feeds from studio and camera sources, DVD and VTR playback machines and another sixteen PC-generated video and text sources. Each individual stream can be scaled and positioned over single or multiple screens within the wall, with the result that an almost unlimited variety of visual layouts can be achieved to add impact and interest to the display. Images can be placed signally or repeated over multiple screens generating eye-catching effects that draw viewers into the transmission.

All screen processing and image manipulation is carried out by electronics and software located in the screen itself, with all sources fed directly to the screen housing, rather than through an external processing unit. This results in simpler installation and portability; the display is mounted on a movable trolley so that it can be easily repositioned as the office layout changes. It also limits the amount of processing delay on the image as the image scaling workload is spread across multiple processing units, with each screen element dealing with just the section of image to be displayed. In addition, it allows the controller to be remotely located well outside the live studio area and pre-programmed with display effects before transmission starts.

The result is a hugely successful display that is particularly suited to task of news, sport and celebrity action reporting carried out by the Multimedia department of The Press Association. As Asha Oberoi, Head of Multimedia, Editorial at The Press Association said: “The display fulfils our very exacting requirements superbly. We needed a large, bright display that would perform well under studio conditions to attract our customers and support the presenter’s message with live and stored video, text and data and yet be simple to control. Our other major requirement was to be able to switch the source screens to a branded customer background. In the fast-paced arena in which we operate, there simply isn’t time to post-produce material and mix it with the broadcast stream so everything has to be done on the fly”.

Lee Edwards, Managing Director of Interactive View commented “This is our first experience of installation of Elport EU’s DZ-Wall; our faith in Elport EU has been well rewarded. The screen was straightforward to install and integrate and we had no problem configuring the display to operate under the harsh lighting conditions and dynamic operational tempo in The Press Association’s office. We, and The Press Association were particularly impressed by the simplicity of the control program that enables non-technical operators to create stunning visual effects. We look forward to installing more of these screens throughout the UK”.

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