The video wall at the MarketSite studio is operational 24-hours a day, 5 days a week. It broadcasts about 100 daily, live updates for a variety of financial networks including CNBC, Bloomberg TV, Reuters, CNBD India, Business Week and others. With this unremitting schedule, the studio could not afford to be down at all during the work week. To accommodate the zero downtime mandates, McCann specialists worked long weekends from Memorial Day through July 4th. The Digital revamp included replacing each cube one at a time, aligning it, and color balancing it so the wall would be ready for broadcast use each Monday morning.
Due to budget considerations and the zero downtime directives, the new, custom built, Christie Digital rear projection engines had to fit into the existing frame.
Collaborating with Christie Digital Systems, McCann integrated 96 Christie RPMX-D12OU TotalView™ rear projection engines into the existing wall. They are driven by 13 Vista Spyder processors. The Spyders provide a single point of contact to control the 48’ long video display. The network of Spyder processors, work with real time content enabling NASDAQ OMX to configure multiple signal inputs, including still and moving video. It can create flying windows of any size and number as well as other special effects and animation. The Vista software is capable of moving images from cube to cube across the wall, delivering one giant, multi-million pixel image, 96 separate ones, or any combination in between.
The video wall’s split-level design allows reporters to broadcast from the floor and mezzanine levels. The lower tier uses seventy-two 40” rear projection engines in a curved array of 4 rows of 18, while the mezzanine uses twenty-four 50” cubes in two rows. These custom rear projection engines enhance image brightness, clarity and depth of color while providing optimum reliability for the 24-hour a day operation.
On the other side of the video wall sits the working heart of the operation, the Spyder processors and row on row of neatly stacked equipment racks holding Brainstorm PCs which output to an AMX 64 x 64 DVI router, creating a truly digital system.
