Archive - June, 2010

Stuff!

June 22, 2010 in Backteching with 4 Comments

Finally made it back down to the entry mez area (where the Trib All-Time Team setup is going to be) to check out the new LED boards that were installed there.  Looks a lot bigger than it did on the drawings.  I believe that this area is going to be open to the public most of the day, so it’s going to run pretty non-stop.  This strip is right above the team store and runs almost the entire length of the facade.

As always, I’m amazed at the sheer amount of LED in this building.  To think that we have a total of about 400 linear feet at Mellon Arena, and we have more that 1000 feet per ring on the 360 fascia alone.

To the right, you can see the VisionSoft interface from ANC Sports that we’ll use torun most of the LED in the building.  

VisionSoft’s power lies in it’s ability to show multiple LED units and let one operator get a total look at what’s going on in this system by having “virtual displays” on the monitor.  In short, it’s pretty cool.

For the LED in the entry mez area and the spine, however we’re going to use a setup from Scala to keep things going.  While VisionSoft is really a revolutionary product in the LED world, Scala handles long-term programming very well.   The intention is to run venue and event information as well as news headlines and most likely some founding sponsor inventory.  We will switch these displays to the VisionSoft system during game time so they can be tied in with the rest of the presentation.

In case you missed it, PensTV posted an updated time lapse of the construction site:

http://penguins.nhl.tv/team/embed.jsp?catid=19&id=72562

Finally, I want to pop in a plug for one of the sites that inspired me to do this one.  Glen Gower is the director of event presentation (probably not his exact title) for the Ottawa Senators and does a great blog that covers a lot of game presentation and sports entertainment.  He’s always timely with the updates and always seems to find great articles.  Check out http://ggower.blogspot.com if you get a chance.

Evolutions

June 19, 2010 in Backteching with 0 Comments

Thanks to Tony @TheConfluence for pointing out that dust was collecting here.  It’s always great to have your support. ;)

So some updates.  Black ice tests last week to check the chillers.  From all indications, everything went well and there was nice even temperature across the ice.

The concession stands are looking pretty good — all of the signs are backlit, and as most of you saw on the EyeSee360 camera, the Primanti Brothers sign looks good enough to eat.  A lot of finish work going on right now, and even from a few weeks ago the building looks much, much more finished.  I promise some pictures this week.

Diversified Systems upped their presence the last two weeks as we continue the heavy commissioning and configuration of the control room.  So far, we’ve only had to make minor adjustments and things are going well.  To the right you can see the Ross switcher and part of the multi-viewer wall.  We think that we should try to program a Lets Go Pens on the buttons, since you can change the colors to pretty much any color on the planet.

We also set up the EVS Replay, Chyron HyperX3 CG, and Crossfire video playback.

The last big news – and if you walk near 5th Avenue by the arena you know this already — they’ve taken the gates down at the Center/5th avenue side of the building.  Take a walk on your lunch hour and you can get a nice feel for how the CEC blends in to the neighborhood.

So back to the title of this post.  When I launched this blog, I had intended not just to talk about the CEC, but to also discuss the world of content creation and digital media production.  I’ve slacked on that, and turned into a general update blog on Consol — which has been fine.  I’ve really enjoyed bringing the updates to you, and have been overwhelmed by the amount of visitors and uniques.   I’ll still continue to do the updates, but I also hope to write a little more on some other topics that interest me.  I’ve had a lot of great email discussions with people on these other topics, and simply  hope to bring a little more of that into the fold here.

For The Audio Geeks

June 10, 2010 in Backteching with 3 Comments

So a couple requests today to give some love to the audio room.  Well, here you go.

There’s lots of shiny stuff in there.  A couple things have some really really cool blinking lights.  There’s this giant thing that says Yamaha on it that I believe is very very important to the arena.  I thought they only made motorcycles.  Learn something every day!

Seriously, I don’t have time to go deep into the audio room tonight, but I wanted to get some pictures posted.  Give me a couple days and I’ll give some more detail.  I also want to talk to the guys from TSI to make sure I’m accurate on everything.  We didn’t have as much to do with the audio as we did with the video, so I’m still getting a grasp on the system

It is nice having it right next to the control room.  At Mellon the main soundboard, amps, etc were one level below us.  We had another operator in our control room doing a sub-mix.

Also, some photos from the concert announcement last week.

Control Room

June 9, 2010 in Backteching with 4 Comments

Occurred to me on the way home tonight that I keep showing pictures of the control room space, but didn’t post the master plan for the area.  Have a look, and hopefully it helps out for reference.

Hopefully now some of the photos will make a little more sense.

Few things of note:  the Guest/Viewing Lounge is nowhere near as luxurious as it sounds.   A lot of shows — including anything past the second round of the playoffs — require some extra people to be up, in, and around the control room area.   With non-hockey events we never seem to have the room to get all of the staff from these shows where they need to be, so we cleared out a little bit of space.

Studio “7A” is not named after Joey Mullen.  The building is broken up into four quadrants, and our control room happens to be in Quad A.  On level 7.  I wish there was a studio 7B.

This is a great space for us.  One of the challenges at Mellon was that video ops, producer, LED’s, matrix boards, main audio board, etc were spread out all over the building.  At CONSOL, we’ll finally have everyone that works together in the same space.

Also, new big photo gallery at pittsburghpenguins.com

Locker room looks really good.   Some people seem to think that the roof of the room reminds them of the dome at Mellon Arena.

They were laying carpet in these areas in the last week, so we should have some new photos that give a better idea of the finish in the next week.

Let There Be Sound

June 8, 2010 in Backteching with 8 Comments

Fired up the sound system today at the CONSOL Energy Center for some quick testing.  I suggested Elvis.  Ended up being Pink Floyd.

Control Room Pics & Links

June 1, 2010 in Backteching with 9 Comments

Control room is really starting to look like a control room.  Every day more equipment is coming in.  I took these on Wednesday, but just posting them tonight.  Everyone that had been in the control room before the consoles went in had commented on “how huge” the place was.  Looks a lot different when you see all of the equipment inside.  Perfect size in my opinion.  Small photo gallery here.

One of the pictures of note is the edit suite that’s in the control room.  This will be a full Final Cut Studio station that has Pro Tools for audio on there as well.

We added this into the mix instead of a second replay machine.  With the new EVS replay system, we already have twice the amount of angles that we can show than we had at Mellon Arena, and thought that the edit suite would let us create more custom video packages throughout the nice.  So if a player or goaltender is having a great game, we can cut a custom video of him and have the ability to add some bells and whistles to the piece.   It also puts our entire content library at the hands of the editor, so if he needs to go back in time to find an old piece of footage, he can do so with ease as well as accessing all of the angles that the main replay operator has.

This also frees the EVS operator up to focus solely on replays.  Right now at Mellon, he splits his time between doing replays and putting together the videos.

In case you missed it, the dasher boards arrived last week.  I can’t wait to cut holes in them to stick cameras through. Here’s a photo gallery at pittsburghpenguins.com.  There’s also a PensTV video as well:
http://penguins.nhl.tv/team/embed.jsp?catid=19&id=70864

Guess who the first act will be at Consol Energy Center.  Contest with winner getting tickets for the first show.  I’ll tell you this much:  it’s not The Guess Who.  Contest ends June 2.

Student Flush announced today.  Greatest promotional name in plumbing testing history.

Shirt/helmet of the week.  ”Vin Man” from Plumbers Local #27.   I think it would be cool to go around and take a picture of all the great shirts and decorated helmets that the construction guys have.  Lots of cool stuff over there.

Have to spend some time at the site tomorrow, so will try to get some more photos up here and on the main site.  Landscapers were busy last week and the locker room looks like it’s really getting close to completion.  Got some pictures last week that I’ll try to get up before I go to sleep.