New MCR of the Dicastery for Communication

Realization of a new Audio/Video IP technological system

Professional Show had the honour of being selected as a supplier and system integrator for the Master Control Room project of the Dicastery for Communication, located in the Palazzina Leone XIII inside the Vatican Garden, a place with unparalleled history and charm.

The primary activity of the new MCR, operative since January 2022, consists in distributing the audiovisual content and productions of the Dicastery, such as: Vatican Media, Vatican News and Vatican Radio in addition to external production, Vatican Press Room and Casina delle Scienze.

The project was born out of the need to create a new MCR with a modern technological infrastructure and easily upgradable in the future, capable of providing the highest quality standards, as required by the national and international Audiovisual and Communication market.

Thanks to its experience, Professional Show supported the client in this project by offering many benefits, including the optimization and simplification of the operation of MCR, the improvement of the streams quality and the increase in the number of signals managed.

From the beginning, the strategic and key element of this project was the choice to create a technological infrastructure based on IP SMPTE ST-2110 standards, already installed by our company on two OBVAN, and the distribution and contribution structure of a very important Italian broadcaster. 

The centre of the system consists of two Core EVERTZ 3080IPX by 128 25G IP ports in dual path mode. This mode implies the duplication of IP flows in parallel on the two Cores, ensuring redundancy without loss in case of a problem on one of the signal carrier lines.

In addition to the two Core, it is present a master control EVERTZ OVRT and all devices are managed across the platform Magnum-SDVN and VUE which have the task of managing the routing/shuffling of audio and video signals thanks to simple and intuitively graphical interfaces that can be easily customized.

The system is able to manage 1024 3G video signals and currently through the Audio Sub System which allows the shuffling of each single mono audio, it is possible to do the routing of 2560 audio channels in the various formats SDI, DANTE, AES present in the system.

The DANTE integration towards the universe ST2110-30 has been implemented through EVERTZ interfaces of the 9821 EMR-AG-HUB series which have ensured a perfect integration to the AES67 level.

The video room and audio room wall monitor consists of a total of 22 55’’ SONY 4K displays, managed by the EVERTZ EV670-X30 multifunction platform that in this case handles 192 unique sources on 24 layouts. In addition to these is present a SONY 4K PVM-X2400 monitor and a LEADER LV5600 device with 4K and IP 25GB options to control audio and video flows.

Audio flow management is entrusted to the CALREC ARTEMIS 32 mixer, while monitoring is carried out with PAM2-IP TSL devices and GENELEC speakers.

The new MCR is able to manage many diverse and customized flows based on many social platforms, VOD, IPTV, etc. while keeping traditional broadcast channels such as radio and television active and managing new format standards such as 4K, Dolby 5.1, XAVC/H.265.