AV Takes Flight In Busy Terminal

Timing, they say, is everything. And that was certainly the case in bringing a 138-display-long ribbon display to life in the United Airlines terminal in Chicago's O'Hare Airport.

To make the ribbon capable of seamlessly showing scrolling check-in related content across multiple displays, Minneapolis-based AV integrator Electrosonic Systems Inc. tackled perhaps its biggest genlocking project ever.

A Sigma Electronics TSG 490 test video generator was configured to send blackburst signals through Sigma video distribution amplifiers, across video cable, and on to additional amps in suspended “cloud racks” housing Electrosonic MPEG-2 players that drive the displays.

“The aim is to make sure that each of the players is working in sync with the others, and that's done by configuring each player to look for the blackburst signal,” says LeRoy Weibel, Electrosonic's senior project manager on the job.

Depending on the number of displays that make up a contiguous ribbon — typically around seven — the content to be delivered is divided into multiple MPEG files and loaded into the appropriate players. Programmed with time code, the players run the appropriate section and the content is displayed in perfect synchronization on the Clarity Margay displays.

Although only small sections of the 510-foot-long ribbon are being synchronized now, the capability is there to synchronize all 138 displays and the 158 MPEG players (including backups) that run them.

“It's the largest number of players I've ever worked on,” Weibel says. “The unique thing about this challenge was the number of video DAs that had to be used. That was the only way to distribute the blackbursts to that many players.”