FEATURES: BROADCAST
Bringing the news into view Tailor-made convex and concave LED screens have taken pride of place at Al Arabiya’s new news studio
The newsroom’s open design is interspersed with editorial
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The walls work together with the robotic cameras to create more immersive reports COINCIDING NICELY WITH THE MONTHS IN 2020 WHEN viewers were first locked down at home and forced into a greater reliance on television programming to keep up with the rapidly evolving state of the emerging coronavirus epidemic, the UAE’s Al Arabiya network went live with a brand-new, state-ofthe-art studio design offering sweeping views of Dubai, a sleek, modern aesthetic and packed full of new visual technology. Since 2003, the Al Arabiya network has been one of the most popular news sources for Arabs seeking credible news and information about the Middle East and the world beyond. The
24-hour platform publishes breaking news, politics, business, features, opinion and lifestyle. The new Al Arabiya broadcast studio that was launched earlier in the year was clearly designed to amaze audiences. The space features an open design and integrates the direct shooting locations together with editorial workstations and an office area. The nearly 2,500m2 facility is located in a standard office tower not originally intended to be TV studio space. Aside from the glimmering surfaces and razor-sharp architectural contouring, the space is dominated by three large curved videowalls situated behind the presenters that steal the show. With 140m2 of Barco LED videowall comprising 594 X1.5 LED tiles, the Belgian manufacturer’s products are well represented onscreen. When Al Arabiya decided to overhaul its studio design, its engineers left nothing to chance in order to provide the best viewing experience. The vendor selection process was thorough but, after extensive shootouts and testing, Barco was chosen as the preferred visualisation partner. “It is all about the graphics in our new studio,” explains Fadi Radi, director of creative at Al Arabiya. “You can see a videowall in practically any studio shot with a presenter. Certainly, in times when people have become used to hyperrealistic imagery, the videowall image quality will make or break the show. That’s why we only wanted the best of the best.”
However, bringing perfect onscreen image quality in such a unique studio configuration was no simple task. The design features quite a few dramatic twists and is equipped with 13 robotic cameras that travel dynamically between the one convex and two concave videowalls. Making sure that the displays’ colours look good onscreen in any camera position was a big challenge, Radi recalls. “We wanted consistent, high-contrast and saturated colours for our graphics across the entire studio design, and we needed them to be presented in the best possible resolution. An additional challenge was the fact that our studio allows daylight to come in, so we needed colours that were equally stunning at night as during the day. Barco certainly has made this possible.” The technology that drives this colour excellence is Barco’s Infinipix image processing platform. The system is integrated with a Vizrt video playout platform to ensure that colours look perfect in all camera positions, even under the tightest angles. In addition, with Barco’s E2 screen management platform, the Al Arabiya production team can get creative through the development of a virtually unlimited amount of content templates to cater for their 24/7 programming schedule. This gives the news team the ability to easily change the mood of the studio and adapt its graphics compositions according to the show requirements.
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