The new Fox Business Network studio was designed to inundate viewers and on-air personalities with video and data.
Credit: Raeford Dwyer Photography
CHALLENGE: Introduce a measure of flexibility to an inflexible space while helping a new cable network make a splash.
SOLUTION: Raise the studio's floor to countersink a conversation pit and wrap an existing structural column in LED panels.
THE TV BUSINESS NEWS MARKET IS CROWDED, so when Fox decided to launch a business channel, it wanted to stand out from the pack. That quest to be different shows in the design of its Midtown Manhattan studio, which features a mix of curved projection screens, an LED tower, and 50-plus plasma displays.
One challenge literally stood in the way of Edison, N.J.-based McCann Systems, the AV integrator, and its partner on the project, Clickspring Design: a 10-foot-tall structural column about one-quarter of the way into the studio. The two companies literally worked around the problem by wrapping it with LED displays from Nu-media Display Systems.
“I don't think anyone would know that there's a structural column there,” says Erik Ulfers, founder and principal of New York-based Clickspring.
The studio's giant support column was immovable, so McCann Systems carefully wrapped LED displays around it to create an eye-catching centerpiece.
Credit: Raeford Dwyer Photography
But wrapping the column was easier said than done. McCann had to gingerly bend the four LED panels—each 10 x 131 inches—to fit the column's tight radius. When it came to figuring out how much they could be bent, McCann wound up going entirely by feel.
“It's not a standard question: ‘Exactly how much can we bend the LED boards before they break?'” says Nino Fusaro, McCann's project manager. “We knew the radius we needed to cover and the LED manufacturer agreed the flex was not severe. The difficulty then was distributing the pressure as evenly as possible to minimize the stress on the LED boards.”
McCann also had to fabricate a flexible track, which the boards were fastened to. The whole system then had to be rewired because there wasn't room on the column to tuck away the displays' electronics. Instead, extra-long cables had to be custom-made.
“The structure should have accommodated all of the power supplies and PC boards in a separate well, as opposed to extending all of the wires and remotely mounting everything,” Fusaro says. “That was the hardest part of the project.”
The LED tower is one of the set's most visually striking features. Fox Business Network directors use it to display information such as stock tickers and breaking news headlines.
CONVERSATION PIECE
The LED tower wasn't the only part of the project where Clickspring and McCann had to be flexible: Fox needed the new set in four weeks. “It was a fire drill,” says Ulfers, whose firm's other recent broadcast projects include sets for CNN and MSNBC. “But it's very common in broadcast for a launch to have a very limited time frame.”
Although the design phase had a few more weeks, construction was limited to four. The space itself also was relatively small, limiting elbowroom. “You'd have the old set being torn down as the new set is being built right behind it,” Fusaro says. “Everyone being in there at the same time was a big challenge.”
On top of the tight schedule, Fox also had a few unusual requirements, due to its branding strategy. It wanted to differentiate Fox Business Network from competitors such as CNBC by tailoring its content and presentation to appeal more to consumers than to businesspeople. The set had to reflect that approach.
One example is a circular conversation pit, where hosts and guests sit to discuss the news. “They wanted it to feel more comfortable and less presentational, more relaxed,” Ulfers says.
The big catch was that the studio's floor is concrete, which ruled out digging down to carve out the pit. Instead, Clickspring and McCann had to raise the rest of the set so that the conversation pit could sit on the concrete.
The raised floor turned out to have some benefits, too. One was that it created ample space to run cables. “It helped us manage cable in the studio extremely well,” Ulfers says.
PORTRAIT OF BUSINESS
One of Clickspring's design goals was to surround the hosts with tickers and other streams of information—another reflection of Fox's desire to make the network appeal to consumers.
“It's business news, which from a consumer point of view is 100 percent about ingest, getting information on the money in the moment,” Ulfers says. “So we wanted to surround the anchors with a lot of incoming [video and information].” For example the LED board can be used as a stock ticker, while the displays show video.
That incoming information is spread across the LED tower, 52 Panasonic and NEC plasma displays, and two curved, rear-projection Stewart Filmscreen screens: one 8 x 10 feet and the other 8 x 12 feet. Nearly all of the plasmas range from 17 to 65 inches and are in a variety of configurations. For example, 24 42-inch displays sit on the west wall, behind the anchor. Each one can display its own feed, or they can all display the same feed.
The largest display is a 103-inch Panasonic unit that had to be mounted in a portrait orientation.
“You look at the human figure—average 5 feet, 10½ inches—it's perfect for immersing somebody in statistical information,” Ulfers says. “It's a fantastic proportion.” The size and orientation of the 103-inch plasma make the video almost life-size, so it's on the same scale as the person standing next to it.
Of course, a 103-inch plasma also means a lot of weight, more than could be reliably borne by the ¾-inch plywood that typically makes up most broadcast sets. “We had to go back later and reinforce it,” Fusaro says. McCann also had to fabricate a mount for the 103-inch display after it turned out that the stock Panasonic mount wasn't a good fit. “We needed it to be really sleek and tight to the wall,” Fusaro says. “The Panasonic ones stand off the wall way too far.”
The preference for sleek looks continued with the other displays. “We hid a lot of the monitor bezels,” Ulfers says. “There's nothing sexy about a flat screen any longer. It's more about the resolution.” The Panasonic and NEC displays that McCann chose varied from 1024 x 768 to 1365 x 768.
FAMILIARITY BREEDS CONTENT
Clickspring and McCann chose the AV equipment partly because of their experience with it on other projects. The Stewart AeroPlex 100 acrylic rear-projection screen is one example. “It's very flexible,” Fusaro says. “It works with you and looks fantastic. There are other rigid materials out there that might beat it overall in appearance, but as far as being able to work with the product, definitely not. It's fairly forgiving.”
McCann chose the Christie 12K 3-chip DLP projectors for their quality and flexibility.
“The output quality is fantastic,” Fusaro says. “Plus you've got a plethora of inputs. Each projector has a DVI that is fed from the Spyder [video processor] via an Opticom DVI-to-Fiber extender that is the main input. The fiber extenders allow the projectors and Spyder to be located over 500 feet apart without any signal loss. The projectors also have HD-SDI and VGA [input], but the DVI worked best for our application.”
In fact, McCann used a lot of fiber in the studio, partly because it needed to send DVI over long distances, but also to provide some flexibility for the future. “The big plus to fiber is not just the distance you can extend a signal but also that you can change the connection without pulling new wire,” Fusaro says. “Want VGA today? Okay. Need DVI instead next week? No problem. Just swap out the transmitter and receiver, and it's done. With this type of infrastructure, Fox Business has the flexibility to send different types of video feeds or add more video feeds simply by plugging in a box. It's a way to build for the studio's future just in case they want to add or change displays in the future.”
McCann paired the projectors with Christie's Twist Warping and Blending Module. “This was an absolute necessity because of the curved screen,” Fusaro says. “It allowed us to shape the picture to match the curvature of the screen. Without Twist, the picture could not fill the screen properly, and the image would be distorted. For example, there would be no way to have a horizontal line on a curved screen. It would look more like an arc. Circles would look more like egg shapes.”
Because the studio is relatively small, Clickspring and McCann needed to use svelte equipment where possible, such as the 51 Contemporary Research HD tuners supporting the Panasonic plasma displays.
“It's a super-compact little unit,” Fusaro says. “You need at least two full-size racks to do [that many tuners]. We were able to do it in one because of how little the unit is.”
The tuners are controlled by a Crestron touch panel that lets Fox Business Network directors display up to 51 different channels simultaneously. The panel also is designed to support a mix of MATV and HD-SDI channels, as well as HD-SDI feeds to dedicated locations.
And despite the tight schedule, the project came together the way Fox had hoped.
“The say they love the way it turned out,” Ulfers says.
Tim Kridel is a freelance writer and analyst who covers telecom and technology. He's based in Columbia, Mo.