Whitestown, IN—March 2018… With a population of approximately 6,600, Whitestown may seem small compared to nearby Indianapolis, but it is currently the fastest growing municipality in Indiana. The local chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ recently opened a large conference space here that features a video system employing Visionary Solutions E/D4100 PoE, 4K UHD-over-IP, cinema-quality encoders and decoders.
“The conference space is 12,000 square feet and seats 1,000 people,” notes Brady Davis, Director of Sales for Force Technology Solutions, which designed the video systems for the space. “It’s really a multi-use space. Along with the other users, IMMI, the company that owns the building, makes seat belts and such for school buses and other large vehicles, and they can roll their buses into this building, show them off, and host large conferences and trade shows for the company.”
The conference center is equipped with three video projectors. “Campus Crusade for Christ wanted an easy to operate solution so anyone could plug in their laptop and be able to use the video projectors with little or no help,” relates Davis. “With the Visionary Solutions network and the QSC Q-SYS platform, they can plug in their laptop, the video goes into a Visionary Solutions E4100 encoder, and from there it’s distributed to all three projectors. Also, with the Q-SYS Designer control software, we can put video into any projector they want. We tied the Visionary Solutions video system into the existing audio system, which is a point-source system because the ceilings are only about 20 feet up. Thanks to the Visionary Solutions encoders and decoders, we could make the system easy for people to use without help. ”
Alongside the Visionary Solutions network, Force Technology installed an HD SDI video network for large-scale productions. “When a production house comes in,” explains Davis, “they can run a full system like what they would do for IMAG or large conferences or concerts. The production link can be controlled through Q-SYS but it’s all routed through broadcast switchers. That way the production house can just plug in and have a full professional broadcast system over HD SDI, which is the broadcast standard, whether they want to do IMAG or do different types of switching on their own.”
Davis and the Force Technology Solutions team were introduced to Visionary Solutions products by one of their engineers. “We were looking for a good video-over-IP network, and we did some research and really liked the Visionary Solutions platform,” Davis recalls. “The latency is almost inconceivably low. Not only is Visionary Solutions’ technology very fast, it’s very easy for the end user to change around if they wish. We like the company’s service, too: We’ve been able to call Visionary Solutions anytime and get really good answers.”
Visionary Solutions’ 4K video-over-IP advantages also paid off in another recent Force Technology Solutions project. “We put a Visionary Solutions network into a rather large training room in Indiana United Way’s downtown Indianapolis facility,” recounts Davis. “We tied that into a Q-SYS DSP, as well. United Way has three professional TV displays in that space, and we were able to do video over IP and provide automation so that they can feed the same video to all three screens, or they can close the partitions and make it three rooms, using each display independently.”
Although the Campus Crusade for Christ and United Way systems don’t use Dante, Davis is planning to use Visionary Solutions’ PacketAV™ Duet Dante-enabled video encoders and decoders in a project later this year. “We’re taking the dual network idea that we did for Campus Crusade for Christ, with a broadcast system next to a Visionary Solutions network, and we plan to do it on a much larger scale, using Dante,” he confirms. “We really love Visionary Solutions products.”
