Grass Valley Delivers Sports Stadium Production System in Kazakhstan

Grass Valley has completed the turnkey installation of a multimillion-dollar high-definition studio and live sports production system to allow a sports stadium to cover events in house. The new studio gives the Baluan Sholak Sport Palace in Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan, facilities and the ability to manage its own productions without the need to bring in outside contractors.

The system includes eight Grass Valley LDK 4000 Elite cameras, two with wireless transmission, as well as four LDK 8300 Live Super SloMo cameras, which can operate in single, double, and triple speeds. The AnyLight feature produces flicker free replays, especially during indoor use where artificial lighting is applied. To support the LDK 8300 cameras, the studio also includes two Grass Valley K2 Summit production clients with three variable speed K2 Dyno Replay Controllers and a K2 Dyno Production Assistant (PA) management workstation. A Grass Valley Kayak HD video production switcher sits at the heart of the control room.

The installation also includes a Grass Valley EDIUS nonlinear editing workstation to allow highlights packages and other rapid turnaround material to be created. The EDIUS NLE is attached directly to the Grass Valley K2 SAN network, which manages all shared recordings and playback. The facility’s infrastructure features a Grass Valley Concerto Series router with Jupiter router control, and GeckoFlex modular products.

The turnkey project, which included graphics from Pixel Power, multiviewers from Apantac, and a Yamaha audio mixer, was designed by Grass Valley in association with its local systems integrator Skymax Technologies, based in Almaty.

“The stadium, owned by the city of Almaty, hosts events on international level from ice hockey [it was the venue for the recent Asian Winter Games 2011] to football and boxing, as well as big concerts,” said Erik Shortanbayev, CEO of Skymax Technologies. “The city saw an opportunity to now better serve all the users of the stadium by providing all of the modern facilities they would need to produce their own television coverage, reducing costs, and increasing turnaround. And thanks to the great support from our partner Grass Valley, that is just what we have delivered.”

“Design and engineering teams from Baluan Sholak Sport Palace, Skymax Technologies, and Grass Valley sat down at NAB in 2010 to finalize the requirements and sign the contract,” said Aengus Linehan, senior vice president of Global Services at Grass Valley. “We demonstrated to them that we could deliver not just world class products, but a complete turnkey solution without the risks associated with other integrators. And we justified that by delivering the project on budget and on time, giving this remarkable stadium a terrific creative production platform.”

The project included acquisition of the third-party equipment, systems integration, commissioning on site, and training. Following the April 2010 contract signing, systems acceptance testing was successfully accomplished in February 2011, with the training program for the stadium’s team of technicians completed in May. As well as delivering a successful project to the end user, the contract also allowed for detailed knowledge transfer to Skymax Technologies, giving it technology leadership in the Eurasian region.