Miranda To Provide Signal Processing And Monitoring Equipment For NBC's Olympics Coverage

Miranda Technologies, manufacturers of hardware and software for the television broadcast industry, have been selected to provide signal processing and monitoring equipment to NBC during the network's coverage of the 2008 Olympic Games from Beijing, China, August 8-24.
The announcement was made by Dave Mazza, Senior Vice President of NBC Olympic Engineering and Strath Goodship, CEO of Miranda Technologies.
NBC's signal processing infrastructure at the Beijing Olympics will use more than 200 Densite frames to provide the full breadth of interfacing functions. Over 80 of the new XVP-1801/DAP-1781 signal processing card combinations will be used to deliver up/down/cross conversion plus high performance Dolby decoding/encoding.
Primary monitoring and control during the network's 3,600 hours of coverage at Beijing will be performed using four Kaleido-x multi-image display systems, which offer exceptional picture quality and layout flexibility.
To streamline signal quality control, Kaleido-X processor will integrate tightly with an iControl QC monitoring system.
When an operator selects a video signal on the monitoring wall, it will be automatically routed to a wave form monitor embedded in the monitoring display for detailed analysis. The monitor wall will also automatically present the proc-amp control panel for the selected signal to enable rapid adjustment if required.
Mazza said: "The number of feeds being monitored in the IBC has grown dramatically since the last Olympic Games in order to satisfy all of our Remote Studio and New Media offerings.
"Viewers will be able to watch a huge variety of both Live Streams and clip-based content from all of the sports in Beijing. The growth was fueled by the needs of the Network and Cable Broadcasts, the NBC Olympics.com web site, plus mobile phones, video on demand, EST, etc.
There are over 80 feeds coming into the IBC and over 100 feeds going out to the USA. This has made it even more important to be able to closely and quickly monitor signals across our entire system. With the Kaleido-X and iControl QC system, we believe we've found the most intuitive monitoring method, which offers a tremendous level of control."
Goodship said: "A high level of automation lies behind NBC's signal processing and monitoring system. The signals are analysed as they flow through Miranda's hardware infrastructure, and operators are automatically alerted if they fall outside NBC's pre-set signal parameters. Video and audio signals from across the installation can be accessed quickly over IP for highly effective confidence monitoring."
(KMcA/JM)