Challenge: Design a high-definition presentation system simple enough for non-technical people to operate, yet flashy enough to impress prospective clients.

Solution: Hire a systems integrator to build a multi-display system with 5.1 surround sound, operated by a single, centralized control system.

by  Dan Daley

Advertising giant Chiat Day’s regional vice president had a disturbing epiphany one day earlier this year. While making a presentation at the offices of food purveyor Uncle Ben’s, he noticed that the famous ricemaker’s boardroom was outfitted with an impressively large plasma display and a stereophile-quality audio system.

Chiat Day’s office in sunny Marina del Ray, CA, was certainly impressive with its full-size basketball court and a totally open floor plan built around a lushly verdant interior park. Its presentation facilities, however, suddenly seemed woefully inadequate with little more than a 32-inch TV monitor and a couple of speakers fed by 3/4-inch and VHS VCRs. At the dawn of the era of high-definition TV and multichannel broadcast sound, when advertising clients would be looking to their agencies to lead them into the digital media future, Chiat Day’s presentation facilities at its architecturally stunning headquarters were the equivalent of an Alfa Romeo with a lawnmower engine under the hood.

“It was just a regular cathode-ray tube TV with curved glass,” says Michael Warren, president of MW Audio, a Marina del Ray professional AV retail, systems design, and installation company. MW Audio gave Chiat Day a multimedia makeover when the agency decided to invest in an AV system that would reflect the agency’s competence in the technical aspects of digital media.

Kyle Wright, an assistant producer at Chiat Day, took the lead on the project. He took bids from three systems designers before choosing MW Audio for its proximity — it’s in the same city and Wright wanted tech support to be close at hand — and the relationship he had developed with Warren, who became his high-tech guide through the unfamiliar HD landscape. “We have to keep ahead of the culture, especially as it heads into high definition,” he says. “At the same time, we have 600 employees here, and the technology has to be accessible to just about everyone, using only a remote control.” The installation took about five days and was completed in August 2003.

Presentations are done in the company boardroom, a large rectangular room located in a loft in the building’s atrium. Windows on one side look down on the interior park and the opposite wall is covered with fabric panels that inadvertently but serendipitously act as acoustical absorption material. At the project’s inception, Warren held several meetings with large groups of Chiat Day executives, discussing options and design strategies. “They said they wanted to step into the future, and that whole process starts with a new screen,” he says.

The 32-inch CRT was replaced with a combination of imaging technologies. On one of the two shorter walls at one end of a 30-seat conference table, Warren centered a swivel-mounted 50-inch Sony PFM50C1 plasma monitor next to a 4- by 6-foot Stewart Greyhawk screen, which is partnered with an Optoma EzPro 755 DLP projector. Across the front wall, an L-C-R array of three Blue Sky 6.5 self-powered speakers is suspended eight feet above the floor with mounts from OmniMount Systems, with two more Blue Sky speakers similarly mounted on the rear wall as surrounds. A Blue Sky S-12 sub is hidden in a cutout below the plasma screen.

In a Middle Atlantic rack, several source platforms are mounted, including an Apple G4 with a 1.25GHz processor, Chiat Day’s original Sony 3/4-inch deck, a Tascam progressive-scan professional DVD player, and three VHS decks for playback and fast dubbing work. The same rack holds switching and control equipment, including a Theater Digital VISP digital surround processor that can be controlled via RS232. That matches the control signal output from a Crestron TPS-4500 touchpanel controller. A series of Extron SW4-VGA video splitters and 16-channel switchers are also rackmounted. The Extron switcher has four VGA ports allowing laptops to plug in for PowerPoint presentations. All wiring is custom, using Belden and Mogami products.

“This entire system can be controlled from one location with the Crestron touch pad, which has four presets that we created for the lighting that conforms to various configurations of display modes — plasma, projectors, and so on,” Warren says. “The great thing is that you can toggle between any input source and monitoring display, or use them together.”

In an industry where style is believed to reign over substance, Chiat Day’s new $60,000 system gives the agency a modern edge. “Context is everything,” Wright says. “We not only have the ability to see the presentation from any seat around the table — and that wasn’t the case before — but also the coolness of the technology, I believe, gives our people making the pitch more confidence. The presentations become smoother. The media we use to present with becomes part of the pitch, because it lets us convey the important fact that the client’s content is also going to go into a high-definition environment. The road to high-def has to start here.”