Grass Valley has completed the turnkey installation of a multi-million dollar HD studio and live sports production system to allow a Kazakhstan sports stadium to cover events in house, writes David Fox.
The new studio gives the Baluan Sholak Sport Palace, in Kazakhstan’s former capital of Almaty, the ability to manage its own productions without the need to bring in outside contractors.
The system includes eight Grass Valley LDK 4000 Elite cameras, two with wireless transmission, as well as four LDK 8300 Live Super SloMo cameras, which can operate in single, double, and triple speeds. The 8300’s AnyLight feature guarantees flicker-free replays under artificial lighting.
The studio includes two Grass Valley K2 Summit production clients with three variable speed K2 Dyno Replay Controllers and a K2 Dyno Production Assistant management workstation, plus a Kayak HD video production switcher.
The installation also includes a Grass Valley Edius nonlinear editing workstation to allow highlights packages and other rapid turnaround material to be created. The Edius NLE is attached directly to the K2 SAN network, which manages all shared recordings and playback. The facility’s infrastructure features a Concerto Series router with Jupiter router control, and GeckoFlex modular products.
The turnkey project, which included graphics from Pixel Power, multiviewers from Apantac, and a Yamaha audio mixer, was designed by Grass Valley in association with its local systems integrator Skymax Technologies, based in Almaty.
“The stadium, owned by the city of Almaty, hosts events on international level from ice hockey [it was the venue for the recent Asian Winter Games 2011] to football and boxing, as well as big concerts,” said Skymax’ CEO, Erik Shortanbayev. “The city saw an opportunity to now better serve all the users of the stadium by providing all of the modern facilities they would need to produce their own television coverage, reducing costs and increasing turnaround. And thanks to the great support from our partner Grass Valley, that is just what we have delivered.”
The project was delivered on budget and on time, and included acquisition of third-party equipment, systems integration, commissioning on site, and training. Following the April 2010 contract signing, systems acceptance testing was successfully accomplished in February 2011, with the training program for the stadium’s team of technicians completed in May.
