The whirring sound of computers may be welcome in some industries, but for Belgium’s 2FRAME studios, it was more of an editorial hazard. Creating and refining music and sounds for commercials, videos and television requires an attention to sonic detail that the computer noise was challenging.
Faced with this problem, 2FRAME’s Bert Helsen turned to @media, a professional broadcast equipment and services distributor, for a solution. He wanted the studio’s Macintosh G5 computers located in a central room, instead of being in the editing rooms with the Apple Cinema Displays, the television monitors and the Tascam FW-1082 FireWire DAW Controllers.
Tom Hertsens of @media recommended a selection of Gefen extenders capable of extending Firewire, DVI and VGA signals over category-5 cabling. “The Firewire Extenders allow the Tascam unit in each of 2FRAME’s six studios to control the 2.7GHz G5 computers located in the secure and environmentally controlled central equipment rack,” explained Hertsens. “Some of the rooms are 50 metres away. We used DVI and VGA extenders for the digital displays and analogue televisions. Even at that length, there is no degradation of the 10-bit uncompressed standard or the HD video signals.”
The entire installation was completed in less than a day. “The Gefen equipment proved itself to be reliable right out of the box,” said Hertsens. “2FRAME now has a selection of quiet suites where they can concentrate on editing without the machine noise, which makes everybody much more happy and productive.”
