The Press Association

The Press Association provides up-to-the minute news reports to customers around the world in a variety of text and data formats, providing a continuous feed of text, pictures and data into newsrooms around the country. Alongside its core news agency operation, the Press Association also supplies a wide range of content and editorial services ranging from international sports data, comprehensive entertainment guides and photo syndication to editorial training and weather forecasting. Supplying media and information to a wide range of customers across the industry including national and regional newspapers, magazines, TV and radio broadcasters and digital platforms.

One aspect of their operations is to supply on-line streaming entertainment news to subscribing organisations; primarily celebrity gossip, new video, film and CD releases and entertainment information gathered by the Press Association’s own teams of reporters around the world. Subscribers to the service receive up-to-date information and breaking news which they, in turn, use to compile and transmit their own articles.

Virtual News Studio

To provide this service, the Press Association required a virtual studio within the busy central-London Media Centre news office at which a team of reporters compile, edit record and release regular bulletins. The full requirement was for a mini-studio complete with camera, Autocue, and lighting. To further enhance the impact of the transmissions a large high-resolution video wall backdrop was chosen, to be situated behind the presenter. This wall would then be dynamically changed to show single and multiple images pertaining to the story in transmission. The wall would be linked to The Press Association’s own in-house edit suite supplying edited video material relating to the new story and controlled from a single point close to the camera by a local operator. The operator would configure the size and content of feeds onto the wall during transmission. As well as its own material, the wall should be capable of displaying off-air transmissions from a bank of digital terrestrial and satellite receivers.

The Press Association commissioned Interactive View to acquire and install the virtual studio, working to a tight budget and timescale; in addition to limited space constraint within the Media Centre news office.

The objective was to provide a completely self-contained virtual studio that could be run by a minimum of staff, who could prepare and manage their own transmissions from start to finish without the high operational overhead normally associated with TV transmission.

Selection of Equipment

Selection of camera with Autocue, lighting and control and editing was largely dictated by the budget and, more rigorously by the space constraints dictated by the need to install the virtual studio within an area of 3 square metres: a space situated between two corridors and an exterior wall in the office.

A Sony mini-cam coupled with a camera-mounted Autocue unit was installed on a fixed pole attached to a girder in the ceiling void, providing a fixed and stable mount obviating the need to reset the camera for each session. The camera output was then connected directly to the PA’s transmission suite for onward transmission through the internet and as a live broadcast video feed when required. Lighting, again permanently fixed to the ceiling was provided by two Sunstar video lights with daylight tubes. This gives sufficient illumination of the presenter whilst not washing out the video wall or causing distracting reflection and spots on the face of the screen.

The selection of a video wall as a backdrop to the presenter was dictated by the need to provide multiple images with high resolution and, more importantly, the ability to alter and change the appearance of the wall to show single or multiple images as and when available. Since the purpose of the wall is to provide visual support to entertainment news, an inherent ability to create special effects from incoming video and PC graphics would be a distinct advantage. The choice of screen was therefore narrowed to three different technologies: a small LED wall, plasma video wall and multi-panel LCD display. LED was not considered suitable as the overall pixel resolution would be too low and it would require a bank of external equipment to process and manipulate video streams that would not be covered by the budget. A 3 x 3 plasma wall would fit within the space, but would not give sufficient quality on a full screen image at close camera distance and again would required extensive and out-of-budget video processing. The final option, using a multi-screen LCD wall was chosen. This option met the requirements fully: high resolution and image quality on single and multiple video images, internal processing and scaling functionality eliminating the need for any additional video processing equipment and easy user control and interfacing.

Interactive View specified the DZ-Wall from Elport EU for use in this project. The configuration of this DZ-Wall combines sixteen 19” SXGA, 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 consideration was that the screen had to be sufficiently bright to be viewable under studio lighting required to illuminate the presenter. It also needed to be unobtrusive in a busy, crowded open-plan office and at just 3.3” deep certainly achieves that aim.

Installation

Installation of the virtual studio was straightforward and achieved in a single overnight session since the office was used constantly during the day. The camera, lighting and Autocue equipment was installed as permanent fixtures and aligned, colour balanced and set up with the intention of keeping them in position, ready for use whenever required when simply switched on.

The DZ-Wall video wall could have been fixed to the rear wall permanently, however for ease of accessibility, efficiency and to minimise on-site disruption during installation, it was decided to construct the unit off site as a portable unit on its own, wheeled stand and then to roll it into position and connect for operation. Again this simplified the installation of the virtual studio and meant that all construction, testing and commissioning of the wall could be achieved prior to delivery. Source and control equipment for the wall were installed in a separate room behind the location and configured for adaptability should the PA’s requirements change in the future.

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”.

Operation

A small team of journalists prepares the stories and news content for a transmission and writes the presenter’s Autocue script prior to loading it onto the device in preparation for live presentation. The camera and lighting are permanently fixed and focused onto the presenter’s location in front of the video wall. Thus simplifying and automating the transmission process to a point where a single operator is required to control the equipment; indeed in some instances the presenter herself has acted as the journalist, operator and presenter, although normally the team of five people control and manage the process as a team.

An operator using DZ-Wall’s control program is able to dynamically configure the entire wall to show any combination of up to sixteen 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 singly 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.

Successful Operation

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”.

Equipment List

Camera:
Sony DSR-PD170 DVCAM Camcorder
Varizoom VZMC100 Pan and Tilt Head      

Lighting:
Sunstar 2 tube video light with daylight tubes, barn doors, mains lead.dimming

Autocue:
12” FDP On-camera unit

Audio:
Sennheiser UHF EW312 Lapel Mic

Video Wall:
Elport UK DZ-Wall, 4 x 4, 19” 500 Cd/m 2 TFT screens, SXGA native resolution.
Internal processing for 16 x video feeds and 16 x PC feeds.

Contact

Interactive View:
Tel: +44 (0)207 566 0430
www.interactiveview.co.uk

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