Turner Studios

Turner Studios, the in-house production facility of Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., a Time Warner company, has upgraded its Atlanta, Georgia Studios by choosing a LYNX Technik fiber solution to improve the HD video distribution over 204 single mode fiber I/O paths to four of their six studios.

As part of the project to expand video continuity, Turner Studios deployed 102 LYNX Technik yellobrik dual-channel receivers and transmitters that accept uncompressed digital 3Gbit HD-SDI signals. The HD-SDI signals are transmitted over single mode fiber into a central wideband video routing system.

The project required 92 ORR 1802 dual 3Gbit fiber to SDI receivers and 10 OTT 1812 dual 3Gbit SDI to fiber transmitters. Together this pair provides a very cost-effective dual channel optical transmission / receiver system for signals up to 1080P, all while preserving the uncompressed signal quality.

The LYNX fiber infrastructure is supporting four studios that are used for the production of NBA TV, NBA on TNT, and Turner Classic Movies. In these studios the equipment is located in close proximity to the studio set areas, which meant that the equipment has to be extremely quiet without any fan noise. Another prerequisite was that the fiber transmission equipment be mounted in a compact rack frame with a common power source and redundant power supplies. The yellobrik’s are housed in a 1RU yellobrik frame, which organizes the individual modules into a tidy and extremely quiet centrally powered system.

In addition, Turner installed a card configuration of over 50 LYNX Series 5000 rack-and-card-based fiber interfaces in its control room for fiber transmission monitoring. This system is made up of the ORX 5804 quad 3Gbit fiber optic to SDI receivers and OTX 5844 quad 3Gbit SDI to fiber optic transmitters. All cards are IP addressable and accessible by Turner Studio’s utility LAN via the LYNX APPolo control system.

APPolo software provides Turner with SNMP status monitoring and error reporting of all existing and future interfaces cards.

“I was looking for a fiber transport solution that would work well with our system design of multiple path-pairing of fiber optic I/O pairs, as well as improve our overall signal transmission capacity,” comments Terry Harvard, Senior Engineer, Live Events at Turner Studios. Terry continues,“ I have found the LYNX fiber solutions to be unique in their design and rack frame options. The LYNX team is also extremely responsive to my needs and system requirements, and made this installation a very good experience.”