In mid-October, the System Integration Team installed the Panasonic 103″ monitor in the 10th floor conference room (which looks really great).  The monitor was hoisted by a crane up 10 floors through a window and then was stored in a closet while the construction part of the project was finished. Like everything in this installation, the monitor will serve two separate masters.  In the conference room it will take the place of a typical projector and be used to show presentations and video conference calls.  When the room is used in production mode, the monitor will serve as an adjustable background.  Any of the sources in the room can be fed to the monitor through an HDSDI router.  It might “host” a still for one of the Forum presentations or you might see a moving background from the Final Cut Pro laptop system — really, it could be anything! In a typical conference room set-up, we would have created this scenario with a rear projection screen.  In this case, there was no room behind the screen for a rear projection system, but the necessity to show it on camera, perhaps under lights, made it necessary to use this monitor. The monitor is a great showpiece for the room, and as they say “It really ties the room together.” Earlier last month, we received and installed the camera lifts that are now holding the 4 installed cameras in the ceiling.  I have to give credit where credit is due.  These lifts came from a company called Display Devices, and they were a pleasure to work with.  They customized the lifts per our specifications, and they delivered them on time. The builders and carpenters who installed them did a great job compensating for the weight of the cameras and tying everything into the ceiling in a way that looks great and works well! Now the cool part… What these lifts do is allow the camera to mount flush with the ceiling in the “up” position in order to keep them out of the way when the room is used as a conference room — yet they can still be used as a video conference camera.  In the “down” position, they arrive at about eye level so that they can be used in production mode without the high angle at which these cameras tend to me mounted. These lifts have the cameras inverted, but the same lifts can be used with the cameras mounted inside the box allowing them to completely disappear from the room until they are needed.  Very cool.  I’m  looking forward to working with these lifts again on future projects. Ian Tosh, Director of Engineering Services