32 TVBEurope Summer of Sports: OB Focus
New name, new facilities
Leading sports distributor IMG is relocating and rebranding. Philip Stevens takes a look at new premises and philosophy
BEGINNING IN July, IMG Sports Media will start a move from its existing premises at Chiswick Park, in south west London, to a new 10,000sqm (107,000sqft) facility at Stockley Park, near Heathrow airport. To coincide with the relocation, the Mediahouse, studios and post production arm will be rebranded as IMG Studios. The new site includes six studios — two measuring 186sqm (2,000sqft), another two each with an area of 93sqm (1,000sqft), and two small ‘down the line’ studios — as well as 13 production galleries, more than 70 edit suites, four sound dubbing suites, five radio studios, five transmission suites and a Master Control Room. In addition, there are
dedicated areas for graphics, streaming and encoding. In fact, the centre hosts one of the largest data centres built specifically for digital media and broadcast in recent times. The equipment includes over 160 racks supported by various redundancy systems, plus facilities for IMG’s private Media Cloud.
International architecture
practice Norman Foster designed the building, while refurbishment specialists Overbury completed the offices and furniture fit-out. TSL carried out the systems integration work. “We chose TSL based on its depth of experience, independence from third parties and capacity to deliver to specification and on time,” says David Shield, senior vice president, global director of Engineering and Technology at IMG. “Having issued an extensive Request for Proposal (RFP) for this project, TSL’s response, in terms of technical and commercial scope, was exactly what we were looking to achieve. The company also built our current facilities at Chiswick Park and proved to be a reliable organisation with which to work.” He continues, “construction
work began in January and will be complete by end of this month. Technical installation started at the beginning of April and will continue until September.” Shield reports that one studio will house a standing set for the English Premier League ‘Content Service’ — a 24/7 channel with international distribution of top-flight football games. Another studio will have a standing set for the BBC’s Football League Show. The other studios are available for ad hoc use for IMG’s other clients and outside customers. In all, 20 Sony HXC100
David Shield: “On behalf of the Premier League we’re installing our own fibre network to each of the 20 grounds to allow enhanced production capability”
cameras can be accommodated throughout the building. The same manufacturer provides vision mixers, with Sony 7000 in use in the studios and Sony 3000 in the stand-alone production galleries. These are a mixture of existing and new equipment. “We have tried not to present a huge technology change — which means that much of the
New IMG building accommodates 22 craft suites, 26 ‘pod’ suites (screened off within open office areas), 20 desktop suites and 10 news-cutting desktops
new kit choice is based on existing manufacturers,” explains Shield. “However, there are two big changes. The first is the control system. We have installed an Atos Broadcast Network Control System (BNCS) to give us a high degree of flexibility when it comes to configuring systems for busy weekends.
Sony 3000 mixers where the internal viewers are utilised. Miranda has also provided routing equipment, while Riedel has supplied comms systems.
In the studios themselves, the lighting rigs have been designed by LSI Studio Projects and incorporate power and DMX
A number of products are
involved when it comes to IMG’s asset management systems. “We will migrate and expand our existing VizRT Ardome system and associated Huawei Nearline and SpectraLogic LT05 data tape storage,” states Shield. “We use Avid Interplay for Production
“We’ll migrate our VizRT Ardome system and associated Huawei Nearline and SpectraLogic LT05 storage. We use Avid Interplay for production asset management on a number of productions”
“At those times there can be up
to 14 football leagues all passing through any source to be presented at any mixer. This control system provides IMG operators with a more intuitive interface for quicker turnaround and delivery of native and re-packaged content across all forms of media, including TV, audio, fixed media, in-flight and closed circuit, broadband and mobile. Secondly, we have adopted Lawo audio mixers throughout because of the flexibility they offer through their networked input sources.”
Essential equipment When it came to selecting multiviewers the preferred option was Miranda, except in galleries equipped with
Controls on a 1m grid. “The actual choice of luminaires will be at discretion of lighting directors, but the design of the air conditioning allows for a load of 250W/m2 which would facilitate a mixture of tungsten and LED, if required.” For graphics production, IMG uses a combination of Maya, 3ds max, Combustion, After Effects and MatchMover software running on Matrox Axio or legacy Leitch Velocity equipped workstations. From the 2013/14 football season onwards Premier League Productions will use Deltatre’s Magma system and data feeds from Opta to produce graphics on the international output.
Asset Management for a number of productions.” For editing the huge amount
of material generated for IMG productions, the new facility will accommodate 22 craft suites, 26 ‘pod’ suites (screened off within open office areas), 20 desktop suites and 10 news-cutting desktops. All edit stations connect to centrally housed CPUs using an Amulet KVM system. This allows a user to control
more than one computer from a single keyboard mouse and monitor — streamlining workflow and saving space. “For us, it means that any edit system can be used in any location. Avid Media Composer is the predominant software, but we support some FCP and Adobe
www.tvbeurope.com June2013
David Shield, IMG
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