For Microsoft’s annual Ignite event, MeyerPro Broadcast put a suite of AJA tools to work for fiber conversion, frame synchronization, and recording for the live and livestreamed event. The challenging transmission path needed to flow across multiple locations, including throughout the Moscone Convention Center and to Microsoft’s Seattle studio. The team used AJA FiDO 12G-SDI and 3G-SDI Fiber Mini-Converters to transmit 4K signals from one side of a venue building to the other, and to send HD signals to Microsoft’s Seattle studio. Live event coverage from about 30 cameras went to a centralized camera control room where a director and technical director cut the show and transmitted it to a single stage surrounded by LED walls, and to the other event destinations.
The FiDOs primarily supported the transmission of computer feeds of Teams or PowerPoint presentations and other sources. All the feeds were converted from HDMI or SDI to fiber; MeyerPro Broadcast Engineer Cole Miller converted them back to SDI with another FiDO for integration into the main broadcast fly-pack system on site. “My favorite thing about FiDO-12G converters is the two outputs. We could feed one to the transmission team and loop the other into another FiDO and back to me on site,” he noted. The setup also included a rack of five AJAJ Ki Pro GO multichannel H.264/5 recorders; AJA FS4 frame syncs and a team goto—the DRM Mini-Converter Frame, where all the FiDOs live off a single power supply.
