Cable Channels
Comcast SportsNet Mid-Atlantic, Bethesda, MD
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Comcast SportsNet Mid-Atlantic, located in Bethesda, MD, is the official television partner of the Washington Redskins, Baltimore Ravens, Washington Capitals, Washington Wizards, D.C. United, Atlantic Coast Conference and Colonial Athletic Association.
The network delivers more than 500 live sporting events per year, along with Emmy Award-winning news, analysis and entertainment programming, to more than 4.7 million homes throughout the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia, as well as parts of West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Delaware.
While the network had been capable of delivering some live events in HD, much of its programming was in SD due to the existing systems in the facility.
Communications Engineering, Inc. (CEI) was chosen to handle a comprehensive high-definition (HD) upgrade and expansion of the studio and news facilities for Comcast SportsNet Mid-Atlantic in Bethesda, Md., enabling all of the network’s news and entertainment programming to be delivered in HD.
The project, which was completed on time and on budget, included upgrades to the production control room and studio, two additional master control rooms, equipment core area, transmission system and additional edit suites. CEI handled comprehensive design, equipment procurement, systems integration, installation, testing, training and overall project management for the HD upgrade and expansion.
A key challenge was meeting a hard deadline, which was the start of several collegiate and professional seasons in late summer. It was also imperative that CEI kept Comcast SportsNet Mid-Atlantic on the air at all times during the project, which was successfully accomplished.
With a broad scope and a firm deadline, plus the additional challenge of upgrading a working facility with no down time or program interruption, the project team met the scheduling and technical requirements of Comcast. The result is that millions of sports fans across this region will enjoy much more quality HD programming from Comcast SportsNet.
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Black Entertainment Television Washington D.C.
BET Broadcast Television Center
This project, which was awarded a 1989 BME "Excellence in Engineering Award" consisted of extensive cost feasibility studies, full broadcast turnkey consulting, design, engineering, equipment supply and implementation services performed by CEI for complete construction of a new building and facility to house all BET broadcast operations and offices. Additional areas of CEI service included:
- Multiple satellite antenna uplink/downlink systems interfaced to a complete earth station computer control system
- HVAC, power, and grounding system design and specification
- Full technical area programming and space planning
- Detailed facility floor plans and layouts
- Specialized acoustic designs to compensate for high noise and vibration environment of facility located next to main AMTRAK rail lines and repair depot
- Multiple control rooms, studios and post-production facilities
- Full frequency coordination responsibilities
- Full equipment procurement services
- Building construction monitoring
- Installation and test of all broadcast technical systems
Additional Black Entertainment Television (BET) Projects:
- BET: 50 Foot Mobile Unit
- BET: ON Jazz Cable channel
- BET: SoundStage® Theme Restaurants
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The Discovery Channel, Bethesda, Maryland
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CEI has been a provider of engineering, implementation and maintenance services to Discovery Communications for many years, including the provision of turnkey project services for the design and construction of the Discovery Creative & Technology Center (DCTC) in Silver Spring Maryland.
The DCTC project consisted of the relocation of Discovery’s 24-hour production operation facility across town to a 54,000 sq. ft. office space that was renovated to house production operations. This project utilized both new and existing equipment and was successfully performed with minimal downtime to client production operations. The facility allowed Discovery to expand their in-house production capacities and capabilities.
A key feature was the design directive to configure the non linear suites in a uniform manner thus enabling both greater creative and scheduling flexibility.
Unique to the plant was the requirement to fluently support both NTSC and PAL signals along with a sizeable addition of HD equipment and signal rates.
Custom auto-sensing reference switching and a dedicated reference router was used to accommodate the reference needs for signal rates and formats. This allowed every HD resource to select between multiple Tri-Level reference rates.
With Discovery adding four HD channels to their line-up in 2008, the facility needed major upgrades to support that throughput. CEI and Discovery developed a truly tapeless work flow for their multi- format HD/SD deliverables.
The tapeless workflow is based on Omneon servers for ingest, Avid ISIS/ Interplay for editorial, Anystream software for transcoding and Isilon servers for near on-line storage and file delivery for play-out. Four HD/SD ingest workstations were built with local VTRs and ingest through Omneon servers. A Harris QuiC media analysis server system was also used for quality control of files before being moved to editorial.
One of the largest redundant Avid ISIS/Interplay systems was built to support 30 Avid Media Composers with Avid Nitris. All the edit rooms support Multi-format HD/SD editing with 5.1 audio monitoring and Dolby E. Another 20 edit rooms are stand-alone rooms and in the future will be migrated to the Avid ISIS system.
The Duplication Services area was rebuilt to support the added HD content. It features 25 racks of VTRs, standards converters, proxi encoders and conversion equipment. It also includes 18 Sony SRW5500 HDCAM SR/HDCAM dual format recorders, two Snell & Wilcox Alchemist PH.C HD motion–compensated high-definition standards converters and two Silicon Optix VC100SE-LCP-2CH - up/down/cross converters. Four Protools audio rooms were upgraded to support 64x64 sub-routers and direct connection to Avid ISIS for audio and video files.
The Euphonix MC-Media Application Controller System 5-MC Control Surface was used to support better user interface to Protools, Nuendo and Apples Logic software. Nine Apple-based graphic workstations work with multi-format HD/SD content — all connected via central X-san storage.
Three Miranda HD/SD Broadcast Graphic Systems with a CG option and an Imagestore HD logo inserter were also installed. Finally, a comprehensive SNMP solution was designed to monitor and control most aspects of the plant.
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Home Team Sports, Bethesda, MD
This project consisted of full broadcast turnkey consulting, design, engineering, equipment supply and implementation services performed by CEI for construction of a new facility housing all HTS broadcast operations and offices. About 20% of the equipment from the existing HTS facility was incorporated into the new location. Transition from the old to new plants was accomplished without interrupting program service. Additional areas of CEI service included:
- Full technical area programming and space planning
- Detailed facility floor plans and layouts
- Comprehensive Acoustic specification and designs
- HVAC, power, and grounding system design and specifications
- Automated On-Air Master Control System
- Digital Cassette Library Management System
- Two C and Ku band satellite antennas
- Complete earth station computer control system
- Four microwave links between various HTS Sports Facilities
- 6 fiber optic links between HTS and outside broadcast services
- Television studio with control rooms
- Multiple post-production facilities
- Full equipment procurement services
- Building construction monitoring
- Installation and test of all broadcast technical systems
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Deutsche Welle (German TV), Arlington, Virginia
This project consisted of full broadcast turnkey consulting, design, engineering, equipment supply and implementation services performed by CEI for transition of DW into new facilities located outside of Washington DC. Deutsche Welle (DW) consulted with CEI to expand into a larger, more capable technical facility. CEI was then selected to provide turnkey design and engineering services pertaining to:
- Electrical Power Specification for the technical plant
- HVAC Systems Specifications
- Acoustic design
- MATV system design (VHF, C/KU, & DBS)
- Feed Room (Receive/Transmission) design
- Studio Stage
- Video Control Room
- Post Production Edit Suite
- Announce Booth
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