"CORONATION STREET" GOES HD (July 2010)

Crystal Vision has been chosen as the exclusive interface supplier for the HD upgrade of “Coronation Street”.

Made by ITV Studios, “Coronation Street” is the longest running British soap opera – celebrating its 50 th Birthday this December – and is set in the fictional town of Weatherfield, a suburb of the city of Manchester.

The 39 interface products were purchased and installed by UK systems integrator AVC, who recommended the use of Crystal Vision. The project was to upgrade two studios from SD to HD and to build two new two-camera OB vans in just 10 weeks – while having zero impact on the production schedule. The studio upgrades were carried out in the existing apparatus areas and control rooms which made the project extremely challenging, so equipment delivery was critical.

Jim Crothers, CEO at AVC, commented: “As always Crystal Vision met this very challenging project with their usual flexible approach, and the reliability of their kit meant that we could complete the project with confidence.”

18 Q-Down down converters are being used in the studios and OB vans to provide both s ource distribution and PAL monitoring from a single board. The Q-Down183 version, with its eight input loop-throughs, was selected for use in the studios because additional HD outputs were required there. A useful feature for this project was Q-Down’s ability to swap between SDI and PAL outputs for monitoring. 12 TANDEM HD-21 are being used to embed and de-embed audio for the servers.

Various distribution amplifiers are also in use, with a 3GDA105N providing the HD distribution in the studio, four VDA110M HD used to distribute the Black and Burst analogue reference, and four AADA416FM used for analogue audio and timecode distribution in the OB vans.

The products are all housed together in three Indigo 2 2U frames. ITV Studios is also using its existing Crystal Vision kit, which was previously running in SD and has now been switched over to HD operation.

“Coronation Street” began broadcasting in High Definition on 31st May on ITV1 HD.