The University of Hertfordshire’s £120m de Havilland Campus, including the 450-seat, state-of-the-art Weston Auditorium, was opened in 2003. The auditorium has recently been upgraded to feature two Christie HD10K-M 3-chip DLP projectors, together with a Christie Vista Spyder 344 processor, supplied and installed by integrator QAV.
The 10,000 lumen projectors are used to fill a 12m x 5m perforated screen, with the Spyder processor controlling Lightware 32 x 24 digital and Kramer 32 x 32 analogue matrixes, enabling a large number of sources to be mixed quickly and simply in multiple windows, replacing the cumbersome patch-fields previously used.
Cabling has also been upgraded to CAT5, while digital links from the stage have been converted to fibre and floor boxes replaced with custom built solutions. The entire installation — from the house lighting to the projection — is under the overall command of Crestron automated control.
With 59 mapped inputs on the Spyder processor, the University achieves the high degree of flexibility and functionality ait requires to support the broad range of events and clients that use the system.
The University originally had concerns about processing HDMI/DVI, multiple resolution digital sources and other formats: these were addressed by QAV who ensured that, within the new switching environment, older signal formats can be patched straight in and recorded onto their existing systems using Kramer scalers and upconverters.
In addition to the playback devices, four fixed position pan and tilt HD cameras (and a fifth at the rear, which can double as a roving camera), can be mixed on the new Panasonic vision mixer (with option cards to facilitate VGA as well as SDI mixing), while almost every event that takes place can be recorded direct to hard drive.
