International. The audiovisual production team of the Fédération Française de Tennis (FFT) will monitor all the images of the matches during the French Open with eight MultiView 16 monitors manufactured by the company Blackmagic Design. A 3.2 x 1.3-meter screen was also designed to visualize everything that happens on the main court of Roland Garros, the stadium that hosts the Parisian tournament.
As part of the improvements made to the facilities, four of these devices will be used throughout the year to monitor signals in resolution 1080i50 from the 20 courts located in the tennis venue, even during training and minor tournaments organized by the FFT. In world-class events, such as the French Open or the Davis Cup, the remaining MultiView 16 provide the team with a complete picture of all the signals transmitted by more than 40 international channels specialized in sports, as well as other images from different audiovisual systems.
"We acquired Blackmagic's devices to replace various pieces of equipment we used to use for monitoring. In addition to improving our overall production capacity and allowing us to move from SD to HD, the new monitors give us greater flexibility by directly receiving signals from our SDI switching arrays to see any image we need directly on the screen," explained Christophe Chatain, director of the FFT's audiovisual production team.
He added that "Although most of our sources during the Roland Garros tournament are in high definition, as in the case of other international events, the fact that we can perform UHD monitoring later and select the display mode for these sources, either in full or split screen, offers us a reliable solution with a guarantee of the future."
Recently, the FFT also installed two Blackmagic Smart Videohub 40x40 arrays to improve the infrastructure of the Parisian headquarters. The first is used to distribute fiber optic signals from the different control rooms of the stadium to giant screens for spectators or to the local IPTV network, while the second allows to manage all incoming sources for the audiovisual surface located in the main control room, in addition to the inputs and outputs of MultiView 16.
