FEATURED PROJECTS
Astral Media
Headquartered in Montréal, Québec, Astral Media is a leading Canadian media company active in specialty pay and pay-per-view television radio and outdoor advertising. Astral Media owns several radio stations in Québec and Atlantic Canada, as well as several television stations that are available across Canada, including The Movie Network, Viewers Choice, Family, TELETOON and more.
AEL designed, supplied and installed a control center monitor wall for Astral’s Montréal facility. The monitor wall is composed of Christie Digital 67” Xenon DLP projectors fed by Miranda Kaleido dual heads that process NTSC, SD and HD signals. Kaleido is also part of Miranda’s I-Control software which constantly monitors all signals in the facility. The heart of Astral is a Grass Valley Trinix 256x256 router in combination with a Grass Valley Encore control system. Distribution and signal conversion is done with Miranda equipment.
Astral playout is achieved by 20 SD and 10 HD (mirrored for redundancy) Grass Valley K2 servers. The K2 servers are tied up to a StorageTek SL8500 robotics system that can store 10,000 LT03 tapes (expansion could be as much as 300,000 cells). All media movement is achieved by DIVArchive from Front Porch Digital. The Astral facilities also use DIVA-Director for browsing archived content and will in the next phase integrate media exchange with post production using the “partial file restore” feature.
Channel branding (SD and HD) is handled by Miranda Image-Store and Miranda Intuition. The Volicon CRTC logging solution is also used which can record 60 days per channel of content and users can view the content of all channels across the facility. Integration with the Archive system is supported as well.
