FOX News production studio

When FOX News prepared to add a new, street-level production studio to their midtown Manhattan broadcast operations center, The Systems Group (TSG) was brought in to implement a “21st century operations suite” as part of a turnkey production facility. The addition of the studio allowed FOX News to expand its current programming to include a live audience production. This suite of control and production operations rooms includes production control, audio control and voice-over booth, tape and server playback area, satellite equipment room, and a glass-walled street level studio in the Rockefeller Center district of NYC. The space allotted for the production control rooms and the studio consisted of office space in the News Corp. building, as well as the purchase of the now defunct Dish of Salt restaurant, which is where the studio is now operating. The facility incorporates some of the latest in multiviewer monitoring, hybrid audio mixing and network-connected production systems technology.

The design of the new production environment marked a different path from the model that FOX News had previously used to design the entire facility. The control rooms and the entire graphics department now occupy the former office space. In addition, there are offices for the production staff of the “Dayside” show, and a local satellite equipment room that houses the equipment for the control rooms, the studio and the graphics department.

The production space is used for multiple shows with individual setup needs, which made it necessary to enable the room to be reconfigured as quickly and painlessly as possible. The production control room was designed around a multiviewer-driven, rear-projection display monitor wall and competition overbridge that included serial tallies from the production switcher, as well as router-driven dynamic tally and source ID. The same multiviewer platform sources an LCD overbridge in the audio control room, and monitoring configurations are changeable via snapshot recall between and during shows from a unique technical director cockpit. The integration of a digital switcher and mixer streamlines the process of show snapshot saving, recall and setup.

The space allocated for the build was two stories up from the existing technical and production core, located next to and above a breezeway that runs through the building. Due to the location of the new build, interfacing to the existing technical core required the addition of multiple cabling conduits, a network of demarc panels and extensive coordination with local labor groups. The implementation of the monitor wall multiviewer, the UMD system controller, the switcher and the facility router for integrated serial tallies and dynamic UMD displays proved to be one of the more challenging design aspects to implement. TSG also designed infrastructure to support the future FOX News relocation of the remote robotic camera and video shading control room.

Design Team

FOX News
Warren Vanderveer, VP-op. and eng.
Chris Bauer, dir. eng.
Gordon Jackson, eng.

The Systems Group
Paul Rogalinski, proj. mgr.
John Holt, sr. systems eng.
Darwin Clermont, install. supervisor
Steve Losquadro, lead tech.
John Vasilenko, proj. coordinator
Gus Garcia, James Hughes, Joe
Ortega, Rafael Sumeersarnath and Houari Ramos, tech.