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Interactive TV

Trade Reports by Judah Ken Freed

Interactive television is a reality. Here's the story.

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MEDIA
VISIONS

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A Tour of the Denver
Comcast Media Center
by Ken Freed.
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National digital cable television operations center backing HDTV.
 

A Comcast video production crew with lights and camera equipment filled a corridor of the sprawling Comcast Media Center as Mitch Weinraub led a tour of what originally was the TCI National Digital Television Center. "They're shooting a promo," he explained.

As the senior director of new media initiatives for the Comcast Media Center (CMC), Weinraub holds responsibility for choosing and installing the digital equipment used in producing and transmitting digital programming to Comcast cable systems nationwide, including HDTV content.

"The Comcast Media Center is engaged in the creation, management and deliver of digital television content," he said, adding, "The CMC's production services are among the most extensive and advanced between Chicago and Los Angeles."

The facility at 4100 East Dry Creek Road in Littleton, Colo., has changed a lot since it's 1995 inception by Tele-Communications Inc. Converted at a cost of $120 million from a building first constructed for Petroleum Information, digital television operations now have expanded from half the space into occupying the entire 350,000 square foot building.

After AT&T bought TCI, the National Digital Television Center (NDTC) was expanded. Space that once housed the J.C. Sparkman Center for distance learning experimentation and training was converted for other uses, such as editing suites. When Comcast bought AT&T's cable holdings, the Philadelphia-based multiple system operator decided to eliminate redundancies and moved most of its digital operations to Colorado, renaming the facility as the Comcast Media Center (www.comcastmediacenter.com).

Comcast realized the facility had the advantage of an ideal location. Linked by OC48 fiber to the Titan Road satellite dish farm on Santa Fe Drive a few miles away, the uplink dishes are at 105 degrees West latitude. The Ku-band, Ka-band, C-band, and DBS satellites in geosynchronous orbit overhead can transmit in a cone covering the full continental United States (conus).

The expanded CMC has two levels. Downstairs are production, post production and transmission facilities, plus secure data centers for digital video storage and streaming, as well as broadband cable modem services. Half of this space has raised floors.

Upstairs are offices for the CMC, various cable channels, and two independent production houses, High Noon and Rocket Pictures, which mostly produce cable series and assist on feature films.

The CMC not only shelters Comcast's digital operations, but the operations of varied cable networks, like Discovery, Lifetime, ESPN, and the Game Show Network. Also here are core operations for the InDemand video-on-demand system along with the HITS direct-to-home satellite service. Another section of the building serves at a garage for the 53-foot production truck for location shoots, especially entertainment and sports events.

"We feed a lot of sports through the CMC," Weinraub said. Last year the CMC transmitted nationally 52 local origination pro and college games, mostly picked up by TV stations in the home towns of traveling teams. They further retransmitted dozens of games for DirecTV's Sports Ticket service. One control room in the building handles nothing but sports events.

Weinraub's major initiative at the CMC, he said while winding his way through the crew shooting a Comcast promo, is now HDTV production and distribution for cable and broadcast networks.

He said Comcast is supporting the popularization of high-definition TV by creating a video version of a 16-page brochure on HDTV by the Consumer Electronics Association. The video brochure, shot in HDTV, will be distributed in DVD to CE retailers nationwide.

On his way to the HDTV editing suites, Weinraub walked through the CMC's five working studios, the largest being 64 by 100 feet. One of these was being used for set storage, including a full-scale 1950's diner utilized once or twice each year by the Food Network. Another set stored there is employed frequently by Remax for national sales training viewed by local realtors.

The studios boast Ikegami HK-388 studio and portable cameras for 3:4 and 16:9 productions. The cameras can be supported by 6-foot Cam Mate jibs. Overhead are Desisti and Arri lighting systems with DMX controls.

Each studio has its own digital control room, equipped with Grass Valley Group 4000 digital switchers, Kaleidoscope DVE and Chyron Infinit. The 128-channel audio boards are fed by 8 channel wireless microphones, Digicart, Dat recorders, mini-disk, and studio sound reinforcement systems.

Weinraub said the facility has five Avid Symphony edit suites. Three of them are online and the other two are only for cuts. The nonlinear suites have A-B roll capabilities, he noted, plus Chyron insert capacities.

"All of these online suites are interconnected to one another and the various control rooms," he said, "so once content has been created, we can access it anywhere in the facility where it's needed."

Weinraub then stepped through a door into the HD audio post production section where Bruce Marshall, chief digital audio engineer, manages three ProTools suites, including his own edit suite with 5.1 Dolby sound. A fourth ProTools 6.2.2 suite is now under construction.

"I just finished editing 50 episodes for a Discovery series," Marshall said, "with four of them in HD. I had to cross-pollinate audio between the formats, and using the ProTools HD Accel plugin made it really efficient."

He said that Discovery supplied him with 8 track tape that had distinct tracks for such elements as the narrative voice over, music, and sound effects. "These were separate because the series is being produced for many different markets internationally, and Discovery needed the ability to lift the narrative in one language and replace it with narrative in another," Marshall said.

Marshall said that his primary ProTools edit suite is "floating," isolated electronically and physically from the rest of the facility to avoid any interference. His exclusive air conditioning system has special sound bafflers. His digital file servers reside within soundproofed cabinets, so no machine hum or whirring fans can be heard in the room. On top of the cabinet sat a Telly Award.

Weinraub exited the audio area and finally reached the HD section of the Comcast Media Center.

First stop is an Avid DS/HD Express edit suite where editor Lisa Boursch said she's using a system that can handle almost any digital video tape format, including Sony DVCPro and DigiBeta. She said the HDTV suites also are equipped with HD-CAM tape decks along with both Grass Valley and Pinnacle HD file servers that can store up to three hours of HD content.

"I need different configurations for different clients," she said, noting that Discovery HDTV programs are in 1080i, for example, while ESPN favors 720p.

Within the CMC, Weinraub said that HDTV at 1080i currently runs at about 17.9 Mbps, "but we're working on preprocessing techniques to lower the rates." For outgoing signals, the CMC can originate HDTV at speeds up to 50 Mbps.

He closed the tour at the CMC master control center, where 70 networks are transmitted and tracked simultaneously. The trained operators sit before consoles banks, monitoring every channel for quality assurance. They do "a lot of live stuff" here," he said, "plus a lot of programming fed by satellite or delivered on tape.

"For now, we're still doing master control the old-fashioned way, but our new next-generation NOVA master control center has virtual [automated] administration, which is how all TV networks will operate eventually. We're getting ready for the future today." end.

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First published February 2004 in TV Technology
(
c) 2004 by Ken Freed
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