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Magna Systems scores Touchdown

Press release from Well Above

Eyeworks New Zealand, founded by Julie Christie in 1991 as Touchdown Productions, is one of New Zealand's leading television production companies specialising in broad appeal entertainment, lifestyle, sport and factual programmes.

Recently Eyeworks decided to completely rebuild and upgrade their production facility and approached Magna Systems and Engineering to help.

Magna Systems and Engineering Chief Technology Officer Richard Green explained, “Eyeworks New Zealand’s programming is a consistent ratings success with high rating shows on all three of New Zealand’s major channels, in Australia and the USA so a state of the art production facility is essential. Magna Systems built their original facility in 2002 so we had a good idea how to best approach this upgrade and rebuild.”

Eyeworks also runs two thematic channels, Living Channel (4:3) and the Food Channel (16:9) and is a programme provider for the Sky Platform, so timing and a seamless build were crucial.

Green continued, “Eyeworks wanted an upgrade that was efficient, easily expandable and future proof. So, after much consideration we designed and installed a solution that includes the latest SeaChange servers with MediaCluster® architecture to simultaneously meet both high volatility and high volume of demand without content replication or other costly bottlenecks, a Pebble Beach Neptune multi-channel automation system and Miranda channel branding and processing. We also put aspect ratio conversion on the output using the Miranda kit.”

As the Food Channel and Living Channel are different formats, the aspect ratio conversion capability now allows content to be ingested in its native format and switched during transmission to whichever format is required.

Green added, “Eyeworks also have a lot of NTSC content so we also supplied a Brick House Video Proteus standards converter which features 10-bit SDI, analogue composite and audio I/O, and advanced standards conversion algorithm for PAL to NTSC and NTSC to PAL, comprehensive audio synchronization facilities and a full set of signal processing controls.”

Magna Systems software architects were also called on for the project. “We wrote customer specific translation software for the schedules.” Explained Green. “This sits alongside a large spinning disk cache archive designed to hold content for the rights periods and a Sun storage platform. Another first for the new Eyeworks facility was the installation and use of a For-A multiviewer which is working very well as part of the control room.”

Eyeworks New Zealand Head of Television Greg Heathcote said, “Many of our productions have become household “must sees”. This together with our overseas expansion and recently moving into drama and film means our production facility is absolutely vital. We were very happy with Magna Systems’ approach to the rebuild, their service and support is always of a very high standard and the new facility is excellent.”

Richard Green concluded, “Eyeworks New Zealand is a very well organised and run facility. They are forward thinking, have their own generator in case of power failures and use main and back up servers to protect and preserve their content. You always see clean, crisp integration between commercial breaks and they are particularly skilled in channel branding. I am delighted that we were able to help rebuild and upgrade the production facility for one of New Zealand’s most talented production companies.”