The Sheffield based media programming and systems company, tsg, recently completed the AV installation at the new Lloyds No.1 bar Chichester with several products from Kramer Electronics included.
“We wanted to offer our client better images than is possible with composite video” begins Paul Kemp, Operations Manager at tsg, “so we immediately thought of up-scaling the video to match the native resolution of the plasmas, projectors and LCD Displays that we are installing in our clients’ premises”.
Lloyds No.1 bar Chichester is equipped with a ProMedia hard disk music and media video server that outputs music videos at composite video level, and local advertising and promotional content at VGA level. An additional source is provided by a satellite decoder that also outputs at composite video level.
“The next issue we faced” continues Kemp, “was how to offer our client maximum flexibility with the signal routing, so that any source could be displayed on virtually any display device. One option was to consider a scaling matrix, but this was discounted on the grounds of unreasonable cost, so we invented an ingenious solution using four Kramer VP-719DS ProScale™ Digital Scaler/Switchers”.
The two composite video signals are each fed into separate Kramer VM-50V 1:5 Composite video DAs and the graphics signal is fed into a Kramer VP-6xl 1:6 VGA/UXGA DA. The four Kramer ProScale™ Digital Scaler/Swtichers take feeds from each of the DAs and then they up-scale and output the signals. The display devices that receive the up-scaled signals include an LCD projector, 3 plasma screens and 2 LCD monitors. These displays are divided into 4 groups with Kramer VM-1055 RGBHV DAs reliably providing the necessary signal distribution to the displays whether near or far from the source.
The Kramer VP-719DS scaler/switchers have FTB™ (Fade-Thru-Black) switching which provides a clean, glitch-free transition between the various sources. These Kramer ProScale™ Digital Scaler/Switchers models offer an extremely cost effective way to simplify multi-signal format installations.
Thanks to Paul Kemp and Steve Dunn of tsg for their help with this article. Thanks to Jerry Gilbert for the use of his images.
